How to Beat the 401k Spin, Take Responsibility and Save Your Future

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Let me see these articles from time to time in various different publications. In particular, you often see them in left, very left of center publications like the New York Times. Case in point today, New York Times was the 401k a mistake? And they get into how the 401k got started and how it transformed retirement and left so many Americans out in the cold. And in it, of course, they’ve got

pictures of people walled in a walled off area at a beach with everybody banging to get in people that were left out because the 401k didn’t serve them the right way. I look at stories like this and of course I said I started reading I said I guarantee Teresa Geralducci will be somewhere in this piece. Myself and James

Pethacuchus back, again, this is back around 2008, 2009. We both said she’s like one of the most dangerous people in the country. I wrote an entire piece about her entitled Retirement Raid, where at the time Teresa Geralducci, and they don’t even get into that. They talk about how she wanted to have guaranteed government accounts, but they don’t get into detail what she wanted to do. She basically wanted to take over everyone’s 401k, the trillions of dollars, and then essentially give it to the government.

give it to the government and then have the government guarantee everyone, it’s basically a social security part two, guaranteeing them money at above 3%, 3 % above whatever inflation was at that point in time. Meanwhile, we already got social security that was running out of money back in 2008. Talk about the fact it’s gonna be out of money in 10 years from now. They wanted to do a second one. They couldn’t handle the first one properly and they wanted to do a second one.

But they get into the 401k and they’re talking about how many people have been left out. And they always get into, they always go back to the good old days. yeah, back in the day, people used to work at their job for 30 years and there would be a pension involved. yeah, there’d be a pension involved there and everybody would be taken care of and it’d be okay. I look throughout this entire column, this lengthy.

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column and you know what they didn’t bring up one time, not one time, life expectancy. They didn’t even discuss life expectancy and the various different changes that have taken over throughout time. I mean, you think that that might matter. You think that actuarial tables might matter at some point in time, but no. No, you actually take a look. You actually take a look.

Again, I’m going to pull up a table right now, go over this with you. Okay? Let’s go back. Let’s go back to the good old days. Let’s go post -World War II. You know what? We’ll go to 1940. 1940, you know what life expectancy was in the United States? 62!

62. So again, you take into account when people are supposed to start getting social security, not to mention pensions that started coming into play. Well, we will fast forward. We’ll go to 1950. 1950, well, we got here, 67.

67, hey, we’ll go 1960, 69. Go to 1970, 70. We’ll go to 1980, what do we get? 73. Go to 1990, 70, almost 75, 2076, 2010, 78. And we’ve come back down a little bit and because of obviously some of the.

issues we’ve had with drugs and obviously COVID to some degree.

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Actuarial tables matter. Actuarial tables matter. Life expectancy matters. Anyone, and I’m gonna give an example, because they’re always, they’re talking about the days of pensions and all of this stuff. Okay. Even for government workers. Even people who work for the government. You know, my dad was a small business owner, but he also was a school teacher too. And he had one heck of a pension based upon when he…

started becoming a school teacher. Those benefits over time, they’re like, holy shnikes, we can’t afford to pay this out. They have tiers. And the tiers changed based upon when you started. Simply what? It’s math. That’s all it is, people. We’ve talked about the concept, the entire concept of trying to provide for ones.

retirement and the time that’s involved. And Teresa Jerdicchi talks about this. We can’t have people, senior citizens, it’s wrong to have them working when they get to a certain age. Says who?

says who? Listen, I will give it to her. I will give it to her in the sense that, you know what, certain jobs out there, physically demanded jobs, yeah, it’s different. They’re not going to be able to do them as long. And again, I would not have any problem with having earlier retirement based upon the type of career you have. You could code that. That’s not a difficult thing to figure out. Obviously, you know, people that are involved in construction and roofing and certain things that

You know, it’s more taxing on the body and yeah, yeah, would they have be allowed to have an early retirement, get social security out of younger age? I don’t think anybody would have any problem with that. But asking people to work longer because they’re going to live longer. What are the, what else are you going to do exactly? What else are you going to do? Unless you save enough money, unless you save.

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properly. Then again, they talk about where the 401k has fallen short and in the column as well. They talk about market sell -offs. I was proud of 2008 was real difficult on a lot of people saving money. No, it wasn’t.

It was really difficult on people if you did the wrong thing. If you freaked out and sold everything, if you kept doing what you’re supposed to do and contributing money from every single paycheck, you’re fine. You’re fine. Not to mention for crying out loud, the markets came back pretty quick, didn’t they? Yeah, it was painful at the time. It was painful to watch.

But they came back. They came back and that consistently happens over time. Meanwhile, all these companies, think about all these, they go back to the good old days of these corporate America offering these pensions and all these different things that they had. Many of those companies that were, again, you want to talk about some of the nifty 50. Again, go back to the 1960s where they had an investment scheme out there was a Wall Street. These 50 companies you could buy,

and you could hold on forever because they were never going anywhere. Yeah, go take a look at that list today.

Listen, man, those companies are gone.

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Many of those companies are gone. The dynamic has changed. The country has changed. Yeah, people, unless you want to go to some sort of country with some sort of, you know, like Logan’s Run, where, you know, we’re just going to, you know, you’re only going to live to a certain age and, you know, they’re going to kill you off. That was a pretty good sci -fi movie. There was another one, too, that came out. I remember what year it was. Justin Timberlake was in it in time. It was a great concept. And that movie,

You only live to 25, but you could buy more time. And it was based upon if you were wealthy, you could basically essentially live forever. But anyway, neither here nor there. There’s somebody alive today that’s gonna live to 140.

That’s probably gonna happen. You take a look at the advances that we have. That’s a legitimate possibility.

Again, how do you go about dealing with that?

How does the society go about dealing with that? Again, they’re talking about all these people left out, not having proper retirement. And everybody’s getting their social security. Everyone pays into that. And granted, that’s not enough. So, but yeah, you have to be personally responsible and you have to put money away. And that was a big part of the article too. They’re interviewing anecdotal say, I can’t save any money. Everything has gotten so much more expensive. That’s not a retirement problem. That’s a damn inflation problem is what that is.

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The fact that the cost of living continues to go up here in the United States. And who does that hit? The same people that you are worried about in this column and you have right to worry about them. I worry about these people too.

But it’s not the 401k, it’s not the retirement system that’s the problem. It’s the fact that the dollar doesn’t go as far. And it makes it more difficult for them to put money away on a regular basis. You want to deal with the retirement problem here in the United States? You know what? Deal with inflation. Watchdog on wallstreet .com.