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- Jun 22, 2022
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The policies for the unmentionable-disease mitigation reduced the ranks of the SS recipients (which I think was intentional) so you would think the future would be bright for some time.
Video on not taking social security at age 65
- Thread starter GON
- Start date
How about stop stealing my money and let me handle my own retirement funding. 15% of every paycheck is crazy.
Before any of the above is done, how about you can't draw it or SSDI if you didn't pay in?
It depends on a lot of things. You should know your life expectation based on your lifestyle and family medical history. Some people I know with genetic issues and have low life expectancy, while others with family member often live till 90s.
Also money now vs money later. How good is your investment track record? How good are you with spending discipline? How stressed are you at work that you must retire early? Nobody can answer that for you.
Also money now vs money later. How good is your investment track record? How good are you with spending discipline? How stressed are you at work that you must retire early? Nobody can answer that for you.
The best way is to take everything and put it in a irrevocable trust. I belive you cannot get any government belifits like Housing and welfare for 5 years. you make someone else trustee of your trust. Then you get ss welfare food stamps free utilities. Then your trustee can give you money when you want it. Or your attorney depending if he is the trustee. Of couse you are not in control. Someone else is.
The government will not let anyone starve at least from what ive seen. No lie, i have seen people cme over to this country with nothing and still get everything they need. Of course it is not you and I understand and its not malibu beach and filet mignon like I like!
I like big mac's too (sort of the same)
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Even so, that same event cause astronomical waste-fraud-corruption that far outweighed any inadvertant savings. Hopefully we are getting to a better place now.
I would be in favor of moving SSA back to being a safety net than a retirement plan. Make contributions to a 401K so tax beneficial that everyone contributed. Then over time cut back on SS benefits until it's just a safety net
I believe all Americans should have the basics of food shelter and medical care even if they did a lot of dumb things in their lives.
I heard stories when I was young of people who retired poor and ate cat food as they could not afford real food. That could be just a story. But I think SS came about so no American would retire poor and depend on charity to eat.
GON
$150 Site Donor 2025
What is that company that advertises primarily on day-time TV (Jerry Springer like shows) that offers to buy out an individual's structured settlement?
I wish I had an opt-out option...don't pull from my check and don't pay me anything down the road. Basically, the pastoral exemption would be nice to have as an option for all.
They don't stop payment if you're over FRA and work. If you're under FRA and they stop payment, they credit your ongoing checks and raise those to credit you for the months you didn't get a check, so the effect is basically a suspension and credit, like you had made it closer to FRA in the first place.
I advised my mother to apply for Social Security benefits at 65 even though FRA for her was 66.5 iirc, and they paid some checks out and then stopped. So why did I do that?
Her employer was the nursing home she worked for. One component of her retirement benefits was a pension check, but you didn't get checks for any month you didn't also apply for Social Security retirement benefits, so waiting for FRA would have cost her $28,800 in pension checks she would have never received from the Catholic church.
Then what happened was she got the checks for like 6 months, then a letter from SSA saying that they were stopping her checks, which is fine. I'd explained to her why this happened and what it meant.
She continued working for another 1 year and 8 months, and they restarted her checks. Then they said that they were going to take part of her check to pay them back for the first 6 months, but that they were raising her checks to account for her work, which went on until she was 66 years and 8 months old, which put her 2 months past the FRA and she now gets credited for working two months past FRA, but deducted for 6 months which was given back as part of the benefit increase.
When she got the IRMAA notice I told them I'd handle it and Medicare agreed that the layoff from the facility closure counted as an extreme loss of income, so no more IRMAA.
All this to make sure she didn't lose $28,800 from the nursing home, which told her in 2002 that they'd grow her pension until FRA of 66.5, but then said "We lied, sue us." basically, and stopped growing it at 61. (Nothing happens when a religious employer lies to you about your pension. It's not covered under the same federal laws, or the Pension Guaranty Corp if they decide to stop paying you and file bankruptcy.)
So I told her just punch out, take the severance pay (which was substantial because she'd been there for over two decades), and then hit their butts with an unemployment claim, which is good for $10,000 or until someone hires her, and nobody has yet and there's about a thousand left to go on the UI.
But since she got severance they made her file claims and get nothing for a bunch of weeks starting in like May I think, then the benefits began finally in September.
Why did the employer say you had to apply and get your Social Security checks first before the pension? It's another way for them to be sneaky.
Most people are not smart enough to see that they're trying to pocket almost $30,000 of your retirement money.
Ron Swanson time: If there's two things I hate, it's liars and skimmed milk, which is water that's lying about being milk.
I told my mother that if it was me I just wouldn't ever go back to work in retirement.
I mean, they have this stupid tax on Social Security money that phases in, and the threshold has never budged since 1982 when they started doing it, and frankly if her only income is this tiny pension and the Social Security check then I just wouldn't want to bother, personally, paying the tax on the Social Security money, because they can subject up to 85% of your benefits and tax it as income if you go back to work, and it's really just a slap in the face when they're making off with thousand dollars of your Social Security money. It devalues the contributions that people can continue to make and discourages that, just because they got old.
People tend to get better at what they do with age. In the tech industry though (she was in nursing), they take the most capable programmers and fire them, places like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Intel do, and throw them out like garbage in layoffs that are routine now, and they bring in a bunch of kids who don't know what in the hell they're doing. Kids and H1-B visas, and you get a total freaking mess. The codebase rots because you replace skill with people who have never seen much less written good code.
Companies turn into schemes insisting that code will write itself, with things like Microsoft CoPilot, which trains by violating other people's copyright licenses, and still emits broken garbage, and encourages others to commit plagiarism. It's more like license stripping than AI.
Microsoft has been taking on new debt like mad and firing people like mad, and insisting that "AI" will all work out "eventually" while they dump more money in it every year. Between buybacks and "there will be profits on this eventually", count me out.
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I dont think anyone has the right to anything from anyone else free. I never have and never will. Never took a dime I didnt work for.
All I want is what I have been working hard for my entire life. Ive been working and paying taxes since 1979. Nothing is free. Someone is paying, (or has paid) for it. bugets have to be balanced. Acounting 101. Except in America? We cannot keep allowing the printing money we dont have. We are allowing the devaluation of our childrens future here in this country. Our country gives away trillions. Not billons
All I want is what I have been working hard for my entire life. Ive been working and paying taxes since 1979. Nothing is free. Someone is paying, (or has paid) for it. bugets have to be balanced. Acounting 101. Except in America? We cannot keep allowing the printing money we dont have. We are allowing the devaluation of our childrens future here in this country. Our country gives away trillions. Not billons
Some folks are aware of the waste
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- Joined
- Oct 2, 2024
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- 56
The possibility of living a long time is also a potential to threat to one's well being in the sense that you may live a long life but not be able to afford to live a long life. A lot of us don't earn a ton of money and the costs of living are extraordinarily high even without factoring in health costs as we age. My great grandma lived until age 99, my grandma smoked for 70 years and still hit 83, dad's parents hit their late 80s, and so on. I like working but I know at some point my body is likely to give out and then what?
GON
$150 Site Donor 2025
I want to stay out of politics, but think it is worth noting is we (macro level) elected and relected the people who approved the budget deficits and debts. So essentially, we indirectly approved (macro level) the plundering, misappropriation, and mismanagement of social security. No different than hiring a financial advisor who plunderer ones assets.
I have a structured settlement...*all the prisoners* and I need bail now!
I have a feeling this has happened before here. It is Illinois. We have about 4.83 lawyers per human.
Yes, we got rid of cash bail, but so many people ran and hid from the courts over the years that over the past 50 years, over a million criminal warrants have piled up, at least, with some cash bail on them. So if you have one of those and get caught in Illinois, you could actually be sitting in jail for a while if you can't afford the bail, because your lawyer would have to petition them to convert it.
My ex attacked me and then went and hid in Wisconsin for 5 years. They came back to Illinois and got pulled over for speeding, and sat in jail for 18 days because they didn't just negotiate a surrender. They dropped the charges, but that 18 days in jail can really mess a person up. It's long enough to get fired and evicted.
Deficits go up regardless.
The fiduciary mismanagement of Social Security is that taxes were not higher than they are. You need an equilibrium or the checks eventually get cut, by law. The Trust Fund is a buffer of money loaned to the Treasury at an interest rate via special issue Treasury Bonds, which are an accounting measure. The government has never failed to honor Social Security redeeming the Bonds, there's just not enough Bonds, because Boomers didn't want to pay the tax, and now they want money.
Had they scrapped the taxable income cap or even just raised the payroll tax by about 1 freaking point on the employee and employer over the past 40 years, there'd be enough money in there for the Boomers and then some. As it is, they'll run out of Bonds and the Boomers will get to live to see the mess they created by spitting and cursing at even a modest tax.
My mother is one of these "They STOLE MAH MONEY!" people. Nobody stole anything. They managed Social Security about as well as she would have had she been in charge.
And no, there is none of "your" money in Social Security. Title I is a tax. Title II is a welfare benefit. Title I is allowed due to the Sixteenth Amendment and the Social Security Act. Title II was upheld under the General Welfare Clause. The reason it looks like that is because SCOTUS had recently struck down a bill for other workers which said the taxes directly funded the benefits. So the Social Security Act was structured so that the tax and the benefits are technically not connected much at all other than they have to be in overall parity.
That's why if you die before you reach an age where you claim it, you get nothing, your children get nothing. Nobody gets something (unless you have a spouse you were married to for at least 10 years maybe, who had a lower PIA than yours).
But here's the thing. Social Security is not an investment. It's Social Security, People looked around at all the poor old people and said "This is horrible. We need to help them somehow." and that's why it's there.
The idea of gambling with it in private accounts may have worked out well for some, not well for others, so it does not serve the overall social goal of everyone has something. The pilot program in Texas of the opt-out occurred against the backdrop of booming markets.
I have a feeling that many of the people hurrying up to take what they can out of it at 62 figure we're just going to drive off the cliff and if they wait until 70 their PIA could be cut by 26% or more. The trouble with that is, it still will. And assuming no other laws change, if Social Security benefits get cut, federal revenues will too, and general assistance to the needy will climb because 26% cuts mean more needy.
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I don’t think that’s correct. You shouldn’t pay SS tax on more than the max plus your employer share on your self employed half.
I worded that poorly but hopefully it makes sense.
Seemingly there was no limit. It’s been 4-5 years now, but self employment tax gigged me no matter what.
The problem with that is, it also caused 27 million people to lose their job and not pay any tax while the PPP and CARES Act funds went out with no policing, and much of it turned out to be fraud. Over $200 billion in just the PPP turned out to be fraudulent, that they know of. Along with between $100-135 billion in fraud in the unemployment programs. (Source: GAO)
When 27 million people lose their job and it takes 2 years for things to start looking normal, the payroll taxes are also not going in. The disease also killed and maimed people in all age groups, including prime working age, likely swelling the Social Security Disability rolls with people with lung and heart damage.
So the overall effect on the OASDI funds was probably horrible. I have a feeling that's why they stopped talking about 2033 and said they hope it lasts through 2031.
But overall life expectancy in the US is down nearly 3 years from its peak. Which isn't surprising. The UK (not the US, granted) says that in their country, they're still seeing about 60,000 deaths a year above "normal" and that was in 2024, so the problem didn't go away, they stopped talking about it so people would quit freaking out and go work and spend money. It's always about the economy.
Now they wonder why there's so much disease and respiratory garbage in general out there. My father, who is 73, and in heart failure, thought somewhere in his brain, that getting on a plane with his blind wife who is always tripping over things and hurting herself would be a good idea, and then they spent all month suffering with COVID from December into last month. They spent a fortune so they could be sick in Florida on oxygen in a hospital over a thousand miles from home, instead of in their house in Indiana.
I think the only thing anyone agrees on is this is probably going down in history as the worst decade ever.
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