... This country has a whole wave of people planning to enter retirement
while their net worth is in the red. Why bother to start saving now? And
if you start with less than nothing, what difference will it make how long
you'll have to "make it" on your savings?

You neoconservatives obviously know nothing at all about finance.


Maxprop wrote:
Right. But if that's the case how does one explain that I can retire today,
draw greater than my current income and never touch the principle, even if
interest rates plunge?


Easy... ever expanding credit.
Another explanation is that you aren't including investment
returns in your "current income" (which indeed they
shouldn't be under many circumstances).


Get a grip, Doug.

Got two, thanks.

.... Where in my statement (the one you quoted) did I intimate
that investing for one's future is a bad idea?

Maybe I should have said "you neocons have absolutely no
sense of sarcasm."


I only implied that the life expectancies were seriously exaggerated to be
utilized as a sales tool in order to convince someone with a realistic life
expectancy of 78 that he's going to live to be 95 and therefore needs a much
larger nest egg. Obviously the larger the nest egg the better, but to
fallaciously inflate life expectancies in order to sell something is bogus.


Agreed, but obviously it's not working. The U.S. has a
negative savings rate and there's little or no sign it's
going up from here.

OTOH why not retire on credit cards? You can always shuffle
your balance from one card to the next. This modern world of
finance is a freeloader's dream scenario.

DSK