3d ago

Retirement wasn't ever really going to be an option for this generation anyway

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My MAGA dad before the election....
We gotta get Trump back in the White House. My 401k can't take the beating anymore. Wonder what he thinks now? Guess it's the short term pain.
- Seriously?!? What funds was he holding? Almost all of them exploded during Biden's term! Fox News is a hell of a drug.
  
  Yeah, that doesn't even make sense.
  
  MAGA cult members are rather infamous for constantly spouting absurd nonsense that could easily be disproven with a moderate application of actual facts and basic logic...
  But they don't care.
  They are addicted to being aggreived, to blaming non existant or vastly exagerated problems on things that are either entirely or barely tangentially even related to what they are angry about.
  My dad is a MAGA moron as well.
  I can easily imagine him bitching about his 401k in exactly the same way, then I could get him to pull his actual balances over the last 10 years, showing him he is just factually wrong.
  And then he would somehow either praise God or his own cleverness as to being the reason why he is the only person with a 401k who miraculously wasn't affected by this massive stock downturn he knows happened to everyone else, and would then just loop back to 'Biden is destroying everyone's 401ks' within 48 hrs.
  They are cult members, their brains are impervious to anything that goes against their constructed cult identity.
- It’s those democrats causing the damn market to drop!
  
  The term conservative media is using is "globalists".
  Easier to whip their voter into panic.
- The DJIA hit an all time high of about 45000 in Dec 24, not too long aftet the election.
  It has been about 4 months since then, and the DJIA has dropped about 10%, to about 40500.
  But before that, the average growth of thr DJIA, per year, for the last 10 years, was about 9%.
  US median yearly wage is about $50k.
  Avg Inflation for the last 10 years is about 3.5% a year.
  Same for median wage growth.
  Lets say you are 50, and have 150k vested into your 401k, the rough average for a 50 yo with a 401k, and you contribute 10% to your 401k, with a 50% (of your 10%, so 5%) employer match.
  Ok then.
  Here's what your retirement looks like if these trends all continue.
  You have $761k to live off of for 20 years after you retire at 65 and die at 85.
  $38k a year.
  Ah, but now lets just have a momentary 10% drop in the stock market, but hold everything else the same.
  Now you're retiring with $706k, a $55k loss, about $35k a year.
  Ok, now lets say your wages only grow at 0.5% a year, the stock market growth for the next 15 years averages 1%, and inflation averages 6%.
  Oh, well now your 401k is actually uh, $252k at age 65, $12.6k a year to live off.
  If you think that's unrealistic... the stock market didn't top its peak in 1929 untill 1954.
  That is a 25 year period with an average stock market growth of zero, over that time period.
  The tariffs Trump just enacted average out to around a 22% effective tariff rate.
  The Great Depression era Smoot Hawley tariffs were only 19%.
  ....Oh right, and thats all assuming you don't get laid off.
  So that's a lot.of words to say your dad is a fucking imbecile, sorry about that.
  My dad is also a MAGAtard, but he's also all the way down the QAnon rabbit hole, builds ghost guns in his garage... I now live many states away from him.
  EDIT: It is now less than 24 hrs after I made this post ... and the DJIA is now under 39000.
  Thats about a 13% drop from the top, 4 months ago, as opposed to the 10% drop i did all the numbers with yesterday.
  Yee fucking haw!
- Proof?

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