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Your retirement plans . . .
- Thread starter robav8r
- Start date
I heard they've stopped making that.
Wait…we’re supposed to have a plan? Screw it, I’ll do it live.
For now, I’m maxing my 401k and hoping the sleazeballs in DC don’t come up with some way to weasel out of the pension they’ll owe me when I turn 60.
My goal is a fully-funded retirement for Mrs. 7 and myself, plus an O5 reservist pension. The latter will become our travel/fun budget if all goes well. I plan to work well into my 60s, so tax exposure will be an increasingly important part of the conversation.
If I’m figuring out later how to leave something behind for my kids, I’ve won the game.
My goal is a fully-funded retirement for Mrs. 7 and myself, plus an O5 reservist pension. The latter will become our travel/fun budget if all goes well. I plan to work well into my 60s, so tax exposure will be an increasingly important part of the conversation.
If I’m figuring out later how to leave something behind for my kids, I’ve won the game.
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
I like my late great grandmother's approach - die without a dime.
It wasn't about spending recklessly (she was a great depression child and therefore instinctively couldn't bring herself to spend all their savings) but passing on anything that you wanted to while still alive before people start arguing over it after you die.
I'm not sure why this is such a popular opinion among some of my fellow reservists, if the government is at the point where they are screwing us out of our military pension we're going to have much bigger problems.
In their defense, it seems like every few years there's a new tinker to military retirement, Tricare, or VA disability benefits. Those are rarely making them more generous.
Although more and more people I talk to are complimentary of the VA lately (well, pre-2025 announced DOGE cuts, but I don't know where those landed), so that's probably a good thing. They really did a generational pivot from geriatric Korea/Vietnam vets to middle age GWOT vets with vastly different problem sets.
They rarely, and in the case of military retirement, 'tinker' with existing benefits though. The recent proposal todo so with VA disability met with a firestorm and was quickly withdrawn.
I can't think of any way existing military retirement pensions have been 'tinkered' with at all off the top of my head, at least since the end of WWII.
Historically, that's true. However, my first pension payment is still more than 17 years away. Given the accelerating pace of change and our government's apparent willingness to disregard its own rules, I'm making retirement plans with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I definitely don't expect Social Security to be a thing by the time I retire.
If I am proven wrong, then we're even better off, financially speaking.
In reality, at least a portion of Social Security will be available.
With that said, I don't use it as a piece of my retirement calculations at all either.
Take your tree fitty a month and enjoy. As in, $3.50.
By 2050, that might be enough to buy a fluid ounce of gasoline, or one french fry.
I think future solvency issues could lead the government to use a similar mechanism (inflation) to water down retirement pensions. So yeah, you'll still get your pension, it just won't make a dent in living expenses.
Close to 100 years and we haven't retroactively changed military retirements, given how politically radioactive doing something like that is my extreme skepticism remains that anything like that will happen.
About 69-77% of current entitlements through the end of this century, which is a big cut but far from not existing as a thing.
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
I don't see the government allowing a prompt 25-30% cut in benefits.
It'll get addressed in 2030-2032, which is close to when the SSA will have exhausted its surplus "savings" in the form of government bonds. It should be one of the largest issues in the 2028 election cycle, but just like relations with China in 2020 / 2024, I expect that it'll get almost no attention in the campaign season.
They'll probably remove the income cap on SS tax and raise the full retirement age to 70 / early retirement to 65 for people younger than a certain age.
The lesson learned in DC from Bush's social security plan is don't try to solve problems unless they're a crisis. No one wants to spend political capital on a problem that John Q Public thinks is fake news, and too many people have cried wolf about the issue.
I'm actually more worried about the stock market when I hit retirement age. It's estimated that roughly 60% of the S&P's value is from retirement funds and people my age will mark the start of mass withdrawals. I can see a mass YOLO spending spree once people hit their 60s because millenials be like that. And since the S&P is dominated by growth stocks who rely on rising share value to make money, I can imagine a short 10-15% drop followed by a near decade of near zero returns and massive layoffs.
Right now, way more is going in than out.
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You can't think of any way? My pension is ~$26/month less than it was sold to me as an active duty service member because now I need to pay for Tricare (on top of co-pays). Does $26 dollars make or break me? Thankfully no, but it is a change.
I admit, the pension and Tricare are two separate entitlements, but they are now connected, and there's no way to utilize Tricare without paying some sort of fee (which comes from your pension defacto, unless you change that), unlike before.
I know it is quibbling on small details but my point remains that the pension itself wasn't tinkered with/altered/changed, and TRICARE was never an entitlement that was guaranteed by law AFAIK.
The larger point is one that I'll continue to stick to, retroactive changes to military pensions both active and reserve are extremely unlikely.