Lately, every so-called analyst has started talking a lot about the financial crisis pending in the retirement of baby boomers. And the outlook for the future looks the same in all of these “studies”: When this generation begins to retire en masse, around 2011, the (Social Security) pension system will collapse.
There are some differences in the details, of course. Some people expect that retirement benefits themselves will empty the coffers of your country’s social security system (no matter what they call them); Others tell us Medicaid will deplete the system and so on. There are also differences when it comes to the year that state-run pension systems become insolvent (or bankrupt). Depending on who you listen to, you will learn that “Judgment Day” is coming in 2017, 2024, 2032 and so on.
The one thing they all agree on – A.J The pension crisis is coming…
However, if you are willing to delve a little deeper into this issue, you can easily discover that concerns about the pension system and the impending retirement crisis for newborns have almost nothing to do with the current financial and economic crisis that began in 2008.
Many researchers have been warning us starting in the late 1990s and early years of the 2000s — long before we saw any crisis on the horizon. Very respected researchers told us this Boomers don’t have enough savings for their dream retirement. Other researchers analyzed demographic trends and came to the conclusion that there wouldn’t be enough money to pay retirement benefits for all of the newborns.
Unfortunately, no one wanted to hear this news because we lived in a dream world. It’s a well-known and well-established fact that we, baby boomers, hate facing the reality of simple natural processes like aging and death. We were never ready to address these issues and postponed all important decisions until it was too late. We are now at that “hindsight” stage.