Data shows that younger people are often struggling financially, typically have less wealth than people around retirement age in wealthier nations, and less potential to reach the comfortable position many of their elders are in, partly due to steeply rising housing costs, at least in NZ. So why do politicians in wealthy democratic nations keep saying that they are focused on helping retirees (who are often comfortaby housed, etc), rather than seriously proposing an increase in housing? Populations are skewing older, older people are more likely to vote, and saying that you want to help retired people doesn't turn off voters in general, but is quite likely to attract the votes of older people, which can be a winning proposition. This is not a criticism of the senator, who is no doubt well meaning, just a phenomenon I have observed down here in NZ; for example our well known Member of Parliament, Winston Peters, whose nearly unbroken 40+ year political career has been very largely focused on catering to what the older generations want to hear, in a style that they like.
Having a fixed income with respect to Social Security doesn't refer to cost-of-living increases. It means that the base income you retire with doesn't change. That base is fixed: it remains the same for rest of your life. And yes, you will receive a small cost-of-living increase each year to this base. The average Social Security benefit for retired workers is approx. $2079 per month (2026, Social Security Administration). Even with an annual cost of living increase, its hard to live on this amount. About a quarter of older adults--15 millions persons--live solely on Social Security. Many of these older adults also live alone and have high health needs/expenses. I'm a retired Social Worker; I witnessed older adult clients having to chose between paying their utility bills and having the food/medicine they needed. Senator Kelly was right to speak up on their behalf.
Having a fixed income with respect to Social Security doesn't refer to cost-of-living increases. It means that the base income you retire with doesn't change. That base is fixed: it remains the same for rest of your life. And yes, you will receive a small cost-of-living increase each year to this base. The average Social Security benefit for retired workers is approx. $2079 per month (2026, Social Security Administration). Even with an annual cost of living increase, its hard to live on this amount. About a quarter of older adults--15 millions persons--live solely on Social Security. Many of these older adults also live alone and have high health needs/expenses. I'm a retired Social Worker; I witnessed older adult clients having to chose between paying their utility bills and having the food/medicine they needed. Senator Kelly was right to speak up on their behalf.
Having a fixed income with respect to Social Security doesn't refer to cost-of-living increases. It means that the base income you retire with doesn't change. That base is fixed: it remains the same for rest of your life. And yes, you will receive a small cost-of-living increase each year to this base. The average Social Security benefit for retired workers is approx. $2079 per month (2026, Social Security Administration). Even with an annual cost of living increase, its hard to live on this amount. About a quarter of older adults--15 millions persons--live solely on Social Security. Many of these older adults also live alone and have high health needs/expenses. I'm a retired Social Worker; I witnessed older adult clients having to chose between paying their utility bills and having the food/medicine they needed. Senator Kelly was right to speak up on their behalf.
Up to now I have always felt that, agree or disagree with your position, you were an honest and thorough broker of whatever position you wrote about. This column is neither and is, I think, woefully beneath you. The expected value of medical care, adjusting for the existence of Medicare but adding in the expected cost given increasing age and the whopping way-over-general-inflation-rates increases in medical care and living assistance costs, is a serious problem for all but the most wealthy old folks. Having a larger home actually makes it possible to offer someone a room with board for occasional services to aid an older person. Generally family is too far away to step up. That is more efficient and allows older people to maintain a level of agency and familiarity that other options do not. In fact, it would be a great idea to design new developments in a way that older folks could pay for some of the rent/mortgage of younger residents for some simple services … like changing lightbulbs that are out of reach without a ladder, for example. How to manage aging requires a serious look at things, not jumping on the trolling bandwagon. If it is not clear that the “rich old people hoarding homes” message is not just another effort to divide us into catatonia, it should be at least to someone as generally careful as you are.
Strong agree on MY's thesis, but with some provisos:
-- Never discount the effects of luck. To a great extent you can make your own luck, especially given time, but even some people who do everything right will only get bad breaks -- health, employment, family crises, etc. -- so hold onto some humility and compassion for them.
-- The time to start serious planning for your retirement is your early 30s (at the latest!) not your late 50s. Your best friend is "the magic of compound interest", so get it working as early as you can.
-- ALWAYS live within your means, however modest they are, and always put some savings aside, no matter how little you can swing. Avoid debt like the plague that it is. Mr. Macawber's advice to David Copperfield is as relevant today as it was when Charles Dickens wrote it: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." Sixpence wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to make the difference.
-- Keep your head when everyone else is losing theirs. I was approaching 60 during the Financial Crisis of 2008 and saw my investments lose 50% of their value in days. I was lucky -- I kept my job. I also held on and didn't sell off in the panic as so many did, and it all eventually came back.
-- Keep investing even after you retire if you possibly can. Now that I have to make RMDs from my IRA, I'm fortunate in being able to reinvest the entire amount after taxes. A lot of people won't have that flexibility, but most people will be able to make SOME opportunity for themselves. The income from those new investments almost equals the Social Security COLA to keep my income growing.
When I suggest that my younger siblings pay my share for something because "I'm a retiree on a fixed income", they laugh uproariously, and I laugh right along with them. This is why.
I’m 79, spent ten years in the Navy, and am now a retired chemical engineer. My wife and I rely on Social Security, defined-benefit retirement payments, and small IRA withdrawals. Our annual income is slightly over or under six figures, depending on the year. It’s all fixed in nominal terms except for SS.
We have enough to live comfortably, but we are not taking vacations to Europe or buying new cars.
As an old person today you usually have social security + some defined-benefit pension + some RMD from a 401K; while the first one gets small COLAs, the last one has a built in death date that might be well before yours (and usually is, for most older people with modern life expectancies), and the middle one is truly fixed. And then there are the health expenditures of old age which are quite progressive in their design.
This is all fine and proper for me. My main issue with seniors is that they shouldn’t get CA style property tax caps, and that we should have some kind of single payer nursing home/assisted living system to save money so that seniors don’t have to draw down their assets and can leave them to their children
One thing that's happened is that Boomer women got to earn decent salaries. Previous generations of single women worked in pink collar jobs, so their social security payments (based on salary) were low.
This also depended on the extent to which divorced women applied for their ex-husband's social security benefits. I was always kind of pissed at my Mom for not doing this. Her own SSA benefits were low due to the years of housewifery plus the secretary-level salaries.
My Mom was a waitress in the small rural town that I grew up in. The boss I guess stole her & other employees' Social Security contributions- this was before widespread computerized payroll, when I'm guessing the IRS counted on the employer to simply mail the right amount in. It permanently dented her & the other workers' SS, they never got the money back, and the owner never did any jail time- just a fine. He was later Mayor of the town for a while when I was a kid. Good stuff!
Add to this the fact that many senior citizens have large pre-tax retirement accounts that have required minimum distributions that increase as they age, on top of inflation-adjusted social security income.
This is such a phenomenon that there is a lot of focus in the financial advisor world of how to help seniors reduce their RMDs through strategies like Roth conversions, in part because the seniors don’t want all this forced extra (taxable) income!
Debating these competing interests (youth v seniors) is a very legitimate exercise, and the easy answer is that both are underfunded, with the recognition that there is no easy fix based on resource constraints/political reality.
I am reacting to the notion that Social Security and Medicare (combined in the discourse sometimes with discussion of higher income Boomers who are doing very well), being major public investments, somehow have poor Seniors gliding along without a care in the world.
I don’t think Matt or others here actually believe that - but I think many people do! I believe it’s important to remind people of unmet needs of those who live in concentrated poverty and for whom major daily struggles still exist.
I think a post like this undersells that point to a degree that needs a response.
Well, this 87-year-old may have a more realistic view that many of the youngsters on this thread. Certain costs rise fast when you're old. Not food, not housing, not gas, not entertainment. Medical care. You need more: doctor/clinic visits, meds, accessories like canes and wheelchairs, on and on. Hearing aids start around $1500. Joint replacements are not really optional. Just the volume of care gets a bit intimidating. Meanwhile your energy level goes down... it's a complicated conundrum, getting old.
Politely, this was addressed in the article. You could make the exact same argument for young families- 'certain costs rise fast when you have kids', etc. Rather than relying on just rhetorical arguments, Matt presented survey data that covers all Americans of every age, and the results are:
"It’s important to understand that the elderly are quite a bit wealthier than younger people as measured by median net worth. Elderly Americans are less likely to say that they’re having trouble paying utility bills, skipping meals or missing health appointments to save money, or dealing with pest infestations in their home or crime in their neighborhood"
My sons (adults with autism and intellectual disabilities) get SSI, and yes, they get cost-of-living adjustments. But, these cost-of-living adjustments happen once a year. Until then, you just have to live with the monthly amount you receive for that year. I volunteer for a small non-profit that helps people with utility and rental assistance. I'll be talking to an elderly woman on the phone about her electricity expenses (which are very high during the summer in my Deep Red State), and she'll say that she can't afford her June bill because she lives on a "fixed income." I know what she means; for that month, her Social Security retirement benefits will not increase to help her pay her very high electric bill. For any income increases, she'll have to wait for January for those to kick in.
This brings up what I consider one of the more neglected parts of the whole abundance movement outside the slowboringverse: electricity. Life becomes much better on so many fronts if electricity costs 5¢ per kWh.
When she was still working, my mom used to joke "I'm on a fixed income too - it's not like my paycheck is going to jump tomorrow!"
Re: Poirot, which coincidentally I have been diving into in recent months:
"Time is always guilty":
Narratives of Modernity in Interwar Detective Fiction
Stuart Middleton
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966622
Data shows that younger people are often struggling financially, typically have less wealth than people around retirement age in wealthier nations, and less potential to reach the comfortable position many of their elders are in, partly due to steeply rising housing costs, at least in NZ. So why do politicians in wealthy democratic nations keep saying that they are focused on helping retirees (who are often comfortaby housed, etc), rather than seriously proposing an increase in housing? Populations are skewing older, older people are more likely to vote, and saying that you want to help retired people doesn't turn off voters in general, but is quite likely to attract the votes of older people, which can be a winning proposition. This is not a criticism of the senator, who is no doubt well meaning, just a phenomenon I have observed down here in NZ; for example our well known Member of Parliament, Winston Peters, whose nearly unbroken 40+ year political career has been very largely focused on catering to what the older generations want to hear, in a style that they like.
Having a fixed income with respect to Social Security doesn't refer to cost-of-living increases. It means that the base income you retire with doesn't change. That base is fixed: it remains the same for rest of your life. And yes, you will receive a small cost-of-living increase each year to this base. The average Social Security benefit for retired workers is approx. $2079 per month (2026, Social Security Administration). Even with an annual cost of living increase, its hard to live on this amount. About a quarter of older adults--15 millions persons--live solely on Social Security. Many of these older adults also live alone and have high health needs/expenses. I'm a retired Social Worker; I witnessed older adult clients having to chose between paying their utility bills and having the food/medicine they needed. Senator Kelly was right to speak up on their behalf.
Having a fixed income with respect to Social Security doesn't refer to cost-of-living increases. It means that the base income you retire with doesn't change. That base is fixed: it remains the same for rest of your life. And yes, you will receive a small cost-of-living increase each year to this base. The average Social Security benefit for retired workers is approx. $2079 per month (2026, Social Security Administration). Even with an annual cost of living increase, its hard to live on this amount. About a quarter of older adults--15 millions persons--live solely on Social Security. Many of these older adults also live alone and have high health needs/expenses. I'm a retired Social Worker; I witnessed older adult clients having to chose between paying their utility bills and having the food/medicine they needed. Senator Kelly was right to speak up on their behalf.
Having a fixed income with respect to Social Security doesn't refer to cost-of-living increases. It means that the base income you retire with doesn't change. That base is fixed: it remains the same for rest of your life. And yes, you will receive a small cost-of-living increase each year to this base. The average Social Security benefit for retired workers is approx. $2079 per month (2026, Social Security Administration). Even with an annual cost of living increase, its hard to live on this amount. About a quarter of older adults--15 millions persons--live solely on Social Security. Many of these older adults also live alone and have high health needs/expenses. I'm a retired Social Worker; I witnessed older adult clients having to chose between paying their utility bills and having the food/medicine they needed. Senator Kelly was right to speak up on their behalf.
Up to now I have always felt that, agree or disagree with your position, you were an honest and thorough broker of whatever position you wrote about. This column is neither and is, I think, woefully beneath you. The expected value of medical care, adjusting for the existence of Medicare but adding in the expected cost given increasing age and the whopping way-over-general-inflation-rates increases in medical care and living assistance costs, is a serious problem for all but the most wealthy old folks. Having a larger home actually makes it possible to offer someone a room with board for occasional services to aid an older person. Generally family is too far away to step up. That is more efficient and allows older people to maintain a level of agency and familiarity that other options do not. In fact, it would be a great idea to design new developments in a way that older folks could pay for some of the rent/mortgage of younger residents for some simple services … like changing lightbulbs that are out of reach without a ladder, for example. How to manage aging requires a serious look at things, not jumping on the trolling bandwagon. If it is not clear that the “rich old people hoarding homes” message is not just another effort to divide us into catatonia, it should be at least to someone as generally careful as you are.
Strong agree on MY's thesis, but with some provisos:
-- Never discount the effects of luck. To a great extent you can make your own luck, especially given time, but even some people who do everything right will only get bad breaks -- health, employment, family crises, etc. -- so hold onto some humility and compassion for them.
-- The time to start serious planning for your retirement is your early 30s (at the latest!) not your late 50s. Your best friend is "the magic of compound interest", so get it working as early as you can.
-- ALWAYS live within your means, however modest they are, and always put some savings aside, no matter how little you can swing. Avoid debt like the plague that it is. Mr. Macawber's advice to David Copperfield is as relevant today as it was when Charles Dickens wrote it: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." Sixpence wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to make the difference.
-- Keep your head when everyone else is losing theirs. I was approaching 60 during the Financial Crisis of 2008 and saw my investments lose 50% of their value in days. I was lucky -- I kept my job. I also held on and didn't sell off in the panic as so many did, and it all eventually came back.
-- Keep investing even after you retire if you possibly can. Now that I have to make RMDs from my IRA, I'm fortunate in being able to reinvest the entire amount after taxes. A lot of people won't have that flexibility, but most people will be able to make SOME opportunity for themselves. The income from those new investments almost equals the Social Security COLA to keep my income growing.
When I suggest that my younger siblings pay my share for something because "I'm a retiree on a fixed income", they laugh uproariously, and I laugh right along with them. This is why.
Honestly, the situation is a bit depressing.
I will make more in retirement than I do working and that income will continue to grow faster than both inflation and salary during my working years.
I’m 79, spent ten years in the Navy, and am now a retired chemical engineer. My wife and I rely on Social Security, defined-benefit retirement payments, and small IRA withdrawals. Our annual income is slightly over or under six figures, depending on the year. It’s all fixed in nominal terms except for SS.
We have enough to live comfortably, but we are not taking vacations to Europe or buying new cars.
So, high inflation is not welcome.
As an old person today you usually have social security + some defined-benefit pension + some RMD from a 401K; while the first one gets small COLAs, the last one has a built in death date that might be well before yours (and usually is, for most older people with modern life expectancies), and the middle one is truly fixed. And then there are the health expenditures of old age which are quite progressive in their design.
This is all fine and proper for me. My main issue with seniors is that they shouldn’t get CA style property tax caps, and that we should have some kind of single payer nursing home/assisted living system to save money so that seniors don’t have to draw down their assets and can leave them to their children
One thing that's happened is that Boomer women got to earn decent salaries. Previous generations of single women worked in pink collar jobs, so their social security payments (based on salary) were low.
This also depended on the extent to which divorced women applied for their ex-husband's social security benefits. I was always kind of pissed at my Mom for not doing this. Her own SSA benefits were low due to the years of housewifery plus the secretary-level salaries.
My Mom was a waitress in the small rural town that I grew up in. The boss I guess stole her & other employees' Social Security contributions- this was before widespread computerized payroll, when I'm guessing the IRS counted on the employer to simply mail the right amount in. It permanently dented her & the other workers' SS, they never got the money back, and the owner never did any jail time- just a fine. He was later Mayor of the town for a while when I was a kid. Good stuff!
Add to this the fact that many senior citizens have large pre-tax retirement accounts that have required minimum distributions that increase as they age, on top of inflation-adjusted social security income.
This is such a phenomenon that there is a lot of focus in the financial advisor world of how to help seniors reduce their RMDs through strategies like Roth conversions, in part because the seniors don’t want all this forced extra (taxable) income!
Debating these competing interests (youth v seniors) is a very legitimate exercise, and the easy answer is that both are underfunded, with the recognition that there is no easy fix based on resource constraints/political reality.
I am reacting to the notion that Social Security and Medicare (combined in the discourse sometimes with discussion of higher income Boomers who are doing very well), being major public investments, somehow have poor Seniors gliding along without a care in the world.
I don’t think Matt or others here actually believe that - but I think many people do! I believe it’s important to remind people of unmet needs of those who live in concentrated poverty and for whom major daily struggles still exist.
I think a post like this undersells that point to a degree that needs a response.
Well, this 87-year-old may have a more realistic view that many of the youngsters on this thread. Certain costs rise fast when you're old. Not food, not housing, not gas, not entertainment. Medical care. You need more: doctor/clinic visits, meds, accessories like canes and wheelchairs, on and on. Hearing aids start around $1500. Joint replacements are not really optional. Just the volume of care gets a bit intimidating. Meanwhile your energy level goes down... it's a complicated conundrum, getting old.
Politely, this was addressed in the article. You could make the exact same argument for young families- 'certain costs rise fast when you have kids', etc. Rather than relying on just rhetorical arguments, Matt presented survey data that covers all Americans of every age, and the results are:
"It’s important to understand that the elderly are quite a bit wealthier than younger people as measured by median net worth. Elderly Americans are less likely to say that they’re having trouble paying utility bills, skipping meals or missing health appointments to save money, or dealing with pest infestations in their home or crime in their neighborhood"
My sons (adults with autism and intellectual disabilities) get SSI, and yes, they get cost-of-living adjustments. But, these cost-of-living adjustments happen once a year. Until then, you just have to live with the monthly amount you receive for that year. I volunteer for a small non-profit that helps people with utility and rental assistance. I'll be talking to an elderly woman on the phone about her electricity expenses (which are very high during the summer in my Deep Red State), and she'll say that she can't afford her June bill because she lives on a "fixed income." I know what she means; for that month, her Social Security retirement benefits will not increase to help her pay her very high electric bill. For any income increases, she'll have to wait for January for those to kick in.
This brings up what I consider one of the more neglected parts of the whole abundance movement outside the slowboringverse: electricity. Life becomes much better on so many fronts if electricity costs 5¢ per kWh.