How much money do you need to retire? Experts answer the question and explain what went wrong.
"That also means there's quite a few people that haven't saved anything."
![retirement; planning for retirement; millennials can't retire; millennials and retirement](https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy81MTg3ODA1OC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTc3MzAzMTA1Mn0.5BCyfhR0Xe1euZWpGGcJP1oOGHzFQW08hB6TTn2ueeM/img.jpg?width=1200&height=800&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
Experts answer how much money you need to retire, we're behind
If you're like many middle class Millennials then you've likely resigned yourself to never being able to retire. It's a running joke amongst people entering middle-age that their retirement age is death. Meaning they've accepted that they'll likely work until they die of old age because there's no way they'll be able to put away enough money in the next 20 plus years to be able to retire.
This isn't even just a Millennial issue, it's simply more wide spread for this particular generation as wages stagnate while the cost of existing continues to skyrocket. But we've seen adolescents open up GoFundMe pages for elderly workers at their local Walmart or McDonald's who were well past the age of retirement trying to make ends meet.
Millennials have been told since they were in middle school that social security would likely not be around when they were old enough to retire. But how did it come to this and exactly how much do you need in order to retire?
Vox conducted an interview with a couple of financial experts and people who would be considered middle class. The video opens up with Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist, that gives some staggering figures if you're one of those Americans already feeling behind on retirement.
"If you want to maintain your living standards that you have now or you'll have throughout your life, in the American system by the time you're 30 you should have about one times your current salary. By the time you're 40 you should have about two and a half or three times your salary. In your 60s you should have eight to ten times your annual salary," Ghilarducci reveals to Vox.
Those numbers seem unrealistic, even to the expert interviewed when looking at today's economy. She later explains why retirement is becoming an unachievable dream for many working Americans.
"The reason why a coal miner and a lawyer could expect to retire is because of the design of our pension system, which we don't have anymore. Your employer would put money aside for your retirement and that money couldn't be accessed by you. So the dollar that the employer put in on your behalf was put into a big pool of money and it was professionally invested and at the end of your working life, that money would be translated into a lifetime benefit."
According to both of the financial experts interviewed, the laws changed about 40 years ago switching things over to more of the system we recognize today. The entire video is extremely eye opening. Check it out below.
- Gen X woman's retirement plan exposes the sad reality of today's ... ›
- A couple in their 50s live permanently on a cruise ship because it's cheaper than a mortgage ›
- 'Retirement House' on TikTok shows you're only as young as you feel ›
- Mom shares how she charges her 3 young kids rent each month - Upworthy ›
Men try to read the most disturbing comments women get online back to them.
If you wouldn't say it to their faces, don't type it.
This isn’t comfortable to talk about.
Trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault and violence.
A recent video by Just Not Sports took two prominent female sportswriters and had regular guys* read the awful abuse they receive online aloud.
Sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro sat by as men read some of the most vile tweets they receive on a daily basis. See how long you can last watching it.
*(Note: The men reading them did not write these comments; they're just being helpful volunteers to prove a point.)
It starts out kind of jokey but eventually devolves into messages like this:
Awful.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
These types of messages come in response to one thing: The women were doing their jobs.
Those wishes that DiCaro would die by hockey stick and get raped? Those were the result of her simply reporting on the National Hockey League's most disturbing ordeal: the Patrick Kane rape case, in which one of the league's top players was accused of rape.
DiCaro wasn't writing opinion pieces. She was simply reporting things like what the police said, statements from lawyers, and just general everyday work reporters do. In response, she received a deluge of death threats. Her male colleagues didn't receive nearly the same amount of abuse.
It got to the point where she and her employer thought it best to stay home for a day or two for her own physical safety.
The men in the video seemed absolutely shocked that real live human beings would attack someone simply for doing their jobs.
Not saying it.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
Most found themselves speechless or, at very least, struggling to read the words being presented.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
Think this is all just anecdotal? There's evidence to the contrary.
The Guardian did a study to find out how bad this problem really is.
They did a study of over 70 million comments that have been posted on their site since 2006. They counted how many comments that violated their comment policy were blocked.
The stats were staggering.
From their comprehensive and disturbing article:
If you can’t say it to their face... don’t type it.
All images and GIFs from Just Not Sports/YouTube.
So what can people do about this kind of harassment once they know it exists?
There are no easy answers. But the more people who know this behavior exists, the more people there will be to tell others it's not OK to talk to anyone like that.
Watch the whole video below:
.This article originally appeared on 04.27.16