I am 32. I earnestly have never expected to retire. By my teens I already understood that social security was a pyramid scheme, that my grandparents and my parents to a lesser extent borrowed against my future and that of generations after me, and we would have to pay the bill for it. I understood that every bubble, every boom, was in some way artificial, and the burst that followed would ensure that particular industry would not be anywhere nearly as profitable for a long time to come. We binge, we purge, we choose something new to binge on while the vomit is still fresh on our shoes.

We are never going to retire, not voluntarily. We will be pushed out. Unless we do to those younger than us what is being done to us and create a grey ceiling. If our first jobs, careers, and promotions are being pushed back a decade or more at a time, what will it be like for those after us? If we continue population decline, we can ensure they won't be able to vote for a mandatory retirement and people will be getting their first job no longer in their teens as those before me, no longer in their 20s like my generation, but in their 30s. If we continue the pyramid scheme of social security by padding our population using immigration, they would be stupid not to vote us out of power when we're old.

We are doomed. We're the lost generation. If we don't want to perpetuate evils, we will have to take the hit, we will have to pay for the sins that came before us so that no one after us has to.

Welcome to hell, motherfuckers.

Or we could just kill all the old people.

Lot of people really do not realize how expensive retirement is and how much the system is stacked against you ultimately doing so the younger you are. Comment I caught this morning over on the reddits:

i’m a financial advisor. woman (nurse) called in, 56-57 years old, super excited because her IRA was up to $250k - she had never seen so much money before and was thinking retirement, felt really good about all her years of hard work + 50-60hr weeks finally meriting something.

most difficult conversation i’ve had. it took about 3 keystrokes for me to mathematically determine she had no chance of retiring until age 70-75, assuming she reduced her spending modestly as well.

that was a very heavy silence to sit through.

i particularly enjoyed the part where i could be of no further assistance, that felt very good in my soul.

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She should just spend $5 a day on lattes, while she continues working to 75.

But just think! What if she waited instead and had soooo many lattes those last 5-10 years of her life.

Financial advisors are the worst types of scumbags - on a par with used car salesmen and those old has-beens hawking reverse mortgages and gold investment.

I've had "consultations" with these shitheads. "Investment property is a bad idea." You don't want to pay off your mortgage and own your home outright - it's bad for your credit score/etc." They are only there to keep you coming back to solve your "hopeless, hopeless financial woes" so they can keep leeching off of the commission they get for snow-jobbing you.

Basically, after I finished talking to retirement-consultants, I learned to just take whatever advice they gave and do the exact opposite.

I wonder if "3-keystrokes" showed her the amount of money she was wasting on commissions and fees with their company.

Personally I think this article reinforces the point that it is claiming to refute.

But then I never did have even the tiniest bit of respect or tolerance for coffee drones.

Which part? That even spending $5 a day every day for the rest of your life represents a relatively small fraction of your actual lifetime earnings, or the part where investing that money would realistically net you, at most, around 350k?

I mean, 350k is nothing to sneeze at, but it's hardly "solve your life" money.

All of those parts. You made more practical sense in 6 words (350K is nothing to sneeze at) than the article did in several paragraphs of bluster.

Not buying a latte every day is such a trivially easy way to have an extra 350K when you really need it. At even 5%, the typical dividend earning for Canadian charter bank stocks right now for example, 350k would yield an extra $1458 per month with no reduction of your principle. I say "extra" because I don't think the original article (which this article targets) ever proposed that a latte boycott could be one's sole retirement strategy.

And we still haven't discussed what our eventual retiree could do instead with the time that they're no longer wasting waiting in line at Starbucks for a factory-made syrup drink whose chemical makeup is decided entirely by cost and operational logistics.

This times a million for poor people who can't even afford a savings account, let alone an IRA. Go ahead and get your 40 and your scratch-off.

Well if we keep up enough roadblocks to health care then people won't need to retire.

I believe that's the actual plan.

This is the financial equivalent of telling people to just eat a damned piece of cheesecake. If one slice of dessert is going to turn you into the next coming of The Blob, then you've got bigger problems - that small indulgences can be fine so long as they are not the bread and butter of your lifestyle.