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When Social security started, the average life expectancy Was like 61.7 years. So The average person didn’t make it to the age to collect. As such the Social security trust fund grew to epic proportions.Today people live on average to about 78 years.If someone retires at 63 and lives to 78, they will collect for 15 years. If someone waits until 70 and lives to 78 they will receive benefits for about half as long.But what if you live longer than average? What if you live shorter? If you live to age 70, but retire at 63, you will collect for 7 years. If you live to age 70 but wait until 70 to retire, you may not collect at all. In that case, retiring early makes sense.However today, living to 90 years is not uncommon especially if you have the genetic history of long life in your family. Retiring at 63 would get you 27 years of benefits. Retiring at 70 would get you 20 years of benefits. Social security was never meant to support people for that long.Today less than 3 people work for every one that collects social security. In 1940 it was 159 to 1. In 1945 it was 42 to 1. Since 2010 it has been less than 3.The point of this long diatribe is that Social Security is unsustainable in its present form. It MUST be reformed. The retirement age should be adjusted for longevity. I am not suggesting that we tell our seniors that are getting ready to retire they have to wait 5 more years, but that people 10 or more years out should have to wait until age 68 (its 67 for people born after 1960), 15–19yrs 11 months, 69, 20 yrs-24yrs 11 months, 70 and so on.In addition, people who want to can retire 3 years early for a 25% reduction of benefits and delay benefits for 3 years for a 25% increase in benefits like we have now.Of course some will argue that it is not fair to make such a change but it is not unprecedented. A person born prior to 1937 got to retire at 65. After 1960 it is 67. People are living longer. Also their are many more options for retirement saving than we used to have so with 15 years until retirement or longer people can save easier than ever before. Also, people understand the importance of supplementing social security with other retirement savings. We have 401k’s with matching funds by employers, profit sharing, Roth IRA’s, and self directed IRA’s.But back to the original question, why would someone take early benefits? Maybe their health isn’t great and they figure waiting will delay benefits until after they are dead? Perhaps they have enough additional retirement savings that a reduced benefit is acceptable? Maybe they have very few bills and they can make it just fine on the reduced benefit…or they want to retire overseas where costs of living are less than in the US?Or perhaps they are just tired of working and are ready to leave the rat race?Or maybe they plan on working as long as they can and plan on taking their social security to live better or pay off their debt?One this is certain: Social Security is not one size fits all. For some people early benefits make sense. For others delaying benefits make sense. Still others will wait until their full retirement age, because that makes the most sense for them.But the best advice of all when considering retirement is this:start saving for retirement with your first paycheck and every one after thatTake advantage of employer matching with 401k’sDon’t touch it for any reason!If you leave a job, either move those funds to a new 401k or IRA of leave it where it is. It will continue to grow.Remember, Social Security was never meant to be a primary source of retirement income, but rather a supplement to a pension or your retirement savings.Life goes by pretty fast, and before you know it, you will be looking at retirement. The decision we make when we are young to save for it and be consistent with that effort will determine how miserable or comfortable our twilight years will be.

My fact that got me interested in cryptocurrencyI know there are so many people out there with so many different reasons for being interested in this space. Whether it be the technological advantages or simply just the profit potential I would love to hear about why you got into crypto and what you hope to get out of it if anything at all.However, it is a secure payment method, and has some distinct advantages over more traditional forms of payment: Lower fees – Transaction fees are lower with bitcoin than with credit cards, and when cryptocurrency is not exchanged, it also eliminates the need for bank chargesLower fees – Transaction fees are lower with bitcoin than with credit cards, and when cryptocurrency is not exchanged, it also eliminates the need for bank charges.Fraud reduction – A payment made with bitcoin cannot be reversed after the fact. This is different from credit card payments, which can be reversed using chargebacks, a feature often exploited by fraudsters.Instant payments – Credit card payments can take days or even weeks to come through. Meanwhile, cryptocurrency offers instant transfers.No barriers – Cryptocurrency makes international trade more accessible by removing barriers and restrictions to trade, ultimately making it easier to accept payments in different currencies.Attract new customers – As bitcoin is still a fairly new method of payment, offering it as an option for your customers could help you bring in new business.Get ahead of your competition – By being an early adopter of cryptocurrency, you can gain a competitive advantage over your competition.As cryptocurrency becomes more widely embraced, businesses should be keeping a close eye on how this technology develops and consider how it could be used to their advantage.I'll start by saying that I originally got into crypto because of how cool I thought it was that I could openly trade different altcoins instantaneously. As I continue to learn more about this scene I've been trying to find the most useful resources to try and talk with other crypto users .I was so intrigued that each coin had a different concept and it was so cool to watch how prices fluctuated due to different social events.one more usefulness about crypto is when you invest in it with a right source. check more on www.affiliatecoin.tech.A very reliable technology platform and very easiest, most convenient platform for both beginners and cryptocurrency enthusiasts.They are a non-custodial platform, meaning that your crypto is securely and instantly delivering of your investment directly to your personal wallet in 7 days of investment.they double your investment 100% in 7days.

So let’s talk about what’s easily one of the worst pension funds in the world.(Note: One particularly troubling thing is that I can’t call it the worst, as many individual states are in even worse shape, as are an uncomfortable number of other countries. Oh, and corporations. But giving a full sense of the clusterfuck that is western pension funding is beyond our scope here. For this answer we’re going to focus strictly on social security programs in the US.)There’s a good chance that you have only a vague sense of how these programs work. This isn’t to your shame. This is basically by design. Because the more you understand it the angrier you’re going to be, especially if you’re a young person. But that’s not a great argument against getting into it, so strap yourself in for a thrilling and not-at-all-depressing adventure into political math.Two ModelsLet’s start with what a pension fund is. While the basic idea is self-evident enough (“collectively investing money for retirements”), there are two rather different ways of going about that:A fund takes in lots of dues from active workers, which the fund invests for fairly high returns, thus allowing each retiree to comfortably receive more than they paid in, all while ensuring that deposits and future withdrawals are balanced for sustainability.A fund takes in some dues from active workers, which the fund trades for IOUs bearing modest interest, thus mostly paying claims with deposits and not net earnings, all while not being especially careful to balance deposits with long-term commitments.Both are pension funds in a manner of speaking. There’s no rule that the first path must be followed. It’s just obviously better for everyone involved.Anyway, you know where this is going: the various US social security funds are all in that second category.Before we get into the mechanics, I’ll answer one question you’re surely already asking: why?There are a range of correct answers here, which we’ll try to explore in passing. But the simplest one is that these funds were designed by politicians who wanted to get re-elected, and it turns out that one good way to get re-elected is to not raise taxes. Now, sure, this is a fundamentally dishonest form of governing. But the second sad fact here is that our public knowledge systems (schools, newspapers, etc) have largely let this happen. While some have always objected and tried to sound the alarm, few have ever had their objections promoted to the mainstream, which in turn has let a long chain of politicians (from both sides, at nearly every level of government) punt the eventual crisis to the next generation.The immediate problem is that we’re quickly running out of room to continue this hot potato exercise. For most intents and purposes, Millennials and Gen Z workers have touched it last, and are going to be left with a hell of a bill.To set context for the scale of the problem, let’s step back a bit and consider how national debts work.The Two LedgersWhen the US national debt is discussed, it’s generally broken down into two categories:Public debt. These are US federal bonds owned by a range of investors including foreign governments (30%), the US Federal Reserve system (11%), and various state and local governments. There are currently a bit over $17tn USD in these bonds outstanding, representing 75% of the total national debt. These bonds don’t pay much in interest (currently a little better than inflation), but are highly sought after for their relatively low risk. Being backed by the “full faith and credit” of the richest government in the world, they’re widely viewed as the safest bet when it comes to parking money. They’re also popular as collateral and can be used as an alternative to US dollars for some inter-bank transactions.Intergovernmental debt. The other 25% of the national debt, totalling a bit under $6tn. These are federal bonds held in governmental accounts. Basically they’re internal IOUs. Most revenues collected by the federal government all go into one (very) large Treasury account, and are mingled in with everything else. If the revenues are to be earmarked for some specific fund (like a social security trust), then said fund is credited with an equivalent amount of these IOUs, which can be redeemed as needed for cash payments. But if a given fund saw $100bn in deposits and only $75bn in withdrawals, they would get that $25bn surplus back in IOUs, not cash. The Treasury would keep and spend that cash themselves.Now, you might be wondering why it works like this. While you could make a (not-entirely-compelling) case for efficiency, it really has more to do with minimizing the amount of public debt the US has to raise every year.Allow me to quote from the Center on Budget and Planning Priorities, a major DC think tank:Is the Federal Government “Raiding” the Trust Funds?No. Some critics have suggested that lending trust fund reserves to the Treasury is a misuse of those funds. This view reflects a misunderstanding of how the Treasury manages the federal government’s finances.When the rest of the budget is in deficit, a Social Security cash surplus allows the government to borrow less from the public to finance the deficit. [,,,] The Treasury always uses whatever cash is on hand — whether from Social Security contributions or other earmarked or non-earmarked sources — to meet its current obligations before engaging in additional borrowing from the public. There is no sensible alternative to this practice. After all, why should the Treasury borrow funds when it has cash in the till?But is there really no sensible alternative? And is taking from the till necessarily better than borrowing from the public?To answer this, let’s consider two similar investment structures: sovereign wealth funds and university endowments.A Study in ContrastsOne big diffference with the latter two is that they’re definitionally open-ended. Sovereign wealth funds are mostly composed of royalties from natural resource extraction (where the goal is putting that money aside to deal with climate change and shifting the economy to other forms of work when the resources run out), and university endowments are mostly a mix of stabilization and rainy day funds.In practical terms though, they’re very similar to pensions: they take deposits and invest them for future withdrawals, with said investments leaning a bit aggressive thanks to the long time horizons involved (the % of total dollars likely to get withdrawn in a given year is fairly low, meaning that fund managers don’t have to worry too much about liquidity and short-term losses).Now, various countries (including the US) have drafted restrictive laws about how social security funds are to be invested. The guiding motivation was in most cases purportedly just “we don’t want to risk that money being unavailable when the time comes”. But in practical terms it’s hard to take this argument as overly sincere. The market return on federal bonds is increasingly correlated to GDP/inflation (1.5-3%), meaning that the interest gained is pretty much continually offset by the reduced spending power. Your $10 becomes worth $10.30, but the $10.30 only buys you $10 worth of stuff. An effective return of 0-1% above inflation is in most cases far worse than even a modestly-performing market fund.It’s hard to generalize, as returns vary quite a bit between said funds, but the data for SWFs and endowments is pretty compelling. And Canada’s primary pension fund has returned just over 10% over the past decade. While a fund as big as the main US social security trust (just under $3tn USD) would have a hard time matching the best of those returns, it’s not unreasonable to imagine something like 3% above the rate earned on those federal bonds, with other downstream benefits like being able to goose GDP by strategic investment (where the US could supply venture capital for projects the private markets don’t have the stomach for, which has historically worked out really well for federal agencies/departments on a smaller scale).So, imagine that the US switched to a market fund a decade ago (when the interest rates for federal bonds settled to permanently low levels), and that the fund returned 3% over the actual rate paid. Even leaving out any GDP benefits, what would the difference look like?The main social security trust (OASDI) grew by about $90bn a year in deposit IOUs from 2010 to 2020. It currently sits at $2.9tn, inclusive of past interest being rolled over.If those deposits had earned an extra 3% each year, the fund would now sit at $3.73tn, for a net gain of $832bn.Putting this together, the fund is $832bn poorer for settling for federal bonds instead of some market fund. And the only advantage gained by this? The US treasury got to avoid having to sell those extra public bonds, which the market mostly would have been very happy to buy at very low rates.Anyway, if that’s a bummer to you, get ready for the real rub: that whole fund is essentially an accounting fiction.Political MathQuoting from the Social Security Administration itself:Some observers worry that because the general account of the Treasury has borrowed the trust funds' surplus income and spent it, the money will not be there when the time comes to redeem the funds. In fact, the trust funds have been redeeming securities all along. The annual gross acquisition and redemption flows are far larger than either the net acquisition flows that have been seen in the past or the net redemption flows that will be seen once the reserves start declining, and the Treasury's annual combined operations for all the government accounts are larger still.Translating this:the public: “hey, so where’s all the money we gave you?”the government: “don’t worry, we spent it all, but said amounts are smallish relative to how much money we spend on other things”Doesn’t really address the main concern does it?Now, in fairness, there is an argument here. The claim is that “well, look, yes we did spend the money, but we did that to avoid taking on more public debt, and those IOUs paid roughly the same as what we would have paid on public bonds, so really what’s the difference?”One might argue in reply:The interest paid on those IOUs was considerably less than the fund could have earned from a market-based scheme (over the last decade at least).The purpose of using IOUs instead of raising public debt was often to obscure how much the government was actually spending. And if the public was more aware of this scheme, they may have forced politicians to make hard decisions on taxes and spending.Now, you might think I’m overstating that second point. If so, let me ask you a question: who was the last POTUS to actually oversee a reduction in total US debt?Keeners may be quick to say Clinton. He was famous for his economic genius and his surpluses, no? And don’t surpluses mean the debt went down?What if I told you that the answer was Richard Nixon (his first year in office, so the credit is really split with LBJ), and that there are only five other instances of this happening since the OMB’s records start (1940), all of which came under Eisenhower and Truman?So what about those Clinton surpluses? They were modest reductions in public debt, not total debt. In other words, his Treasury issued an awful lot of IOUs. A total of $1,347,619 of them, which more than doubled the size of the intergovernmental debt.Of course, Clinton defenders will say something like “well he was just following the practice of Reagan and Bush Sr., and he shouldn't be blamed for the fact that those social security funds were producing such heavy surpluses those years”. In a way, this is fair. Those IOUs were a direct result of those surpluses flowing into the general accounts. He didn’t cause them. But ask yourself why we have this idea of him having produced meaningful surpluses? Would we still have the same view of him if the claim was “well, actually his government increased spending every year he was in office, but he just got lucky in both presiding over a rising economy and also not having to raise public debt to fund as much as of his spending”?I’ll leave it to the reader to judge. But anyway, the problem gets deeper, because the OASDI trust is about to turn to a deficit, and the fund that was supposed to cover that shortfall is composed entirely of those IOUs.A Crisis DefinedBy official estimates, 2020 is the turning point where the sum of all social security taxes paid will no longer be enough to cover payments. And that spread is only going to get wider. Much wider.To rectify this, the government has two choices:Increase said tax rate (currently 12.4%, split 50/50 between employees and employers) to make up the gap.Draw the required money from the OASDI trust, which would solve the problem for about fourteen years, when the fund would reach zero.Well, the first would be tough. 12.4% is already quite high. In Canada the rate is 10.2%*, and the cap is much lower (about $5,800 CAD vs. over $17,000 USD). And the second is also difficult, inasmuch as that fund is made of IOUs, not dollars.(* Canada’s system is more complicated, as there are three separate retiree-support programs, two of which are funded through general taxation and not a special payroll tax. Best as I can tell those other programs are equivalent to about a 2.5% extra tax. But the difference in caps is substantial.)From an economic perspective, you can argue that those IOUs are kind of like dollars. They represent sure dollars to be paid by the US federal government. But the point is that the US treasury doesn’t actually have those dollars. They’d need to sell offsetting bonds to the public to raise the money.What this means in practical terms:If you’re a young worker, you’re paying 12.4% of your income as a direct wealth transfer to retirees. You are, so to speak, paying rent on the world to those no longer working to improve it, in recognition of their past efforts.This 12.4% isn’t nearly enough to meet promised payments. For the OASDI fund to pay down the gap, the public debt will have to increase by an equivalent amount to the redeemed IOUs (though total debt will stay the same, as it already factored those IOUs).The OASDI fund is going to run out by 2034 anyway.Not a single dollar of those contributions will actually be there for you when you retire. You will be depending entirely on the contributions of those behind you, who very likely will be fewer in number (unless the US seriously revisits their immigration policies).I’m not an expert on pensions, but this seems like a pretty bad deal.The steelman argument (making the other side’s best case for them) would go something like this:Yes, ok, pensions were never funded properly, but that’s because we wanted to spend lots of money on building a country (infrastructure and market development) that would be rich enough to allow you to live a much higher standard of life. So when your taxes go up, remember that your income is much higher than it would be otherwise, and that you are paying from your winnings.We had no way of knowing that federal bond rates would end up going down to 2–3%. We expected a higher rate of interest, and that the fund would meaningfully outpace inflation.We also had no way of knowing that retirees would begin living far longer, and raising the retirement age would have made lots of folks not vote for us, and any other politician would have also folded under that pressure.You don’t really have to worry about there being money left for you when you retire, because the next generation is going to be even richer, and it’s not like they can opt out of these taxes, even if the number of those paying does go down with the birth-rate.I think the first point has some validity. While not all government spending is equal, much of it has led to a fabulously wealthy nation where many can afford to pay a 12.4% tax without undue hardship. But that “many” is not a majority. If we look at household debt (including student debt), the majority are US workers are in the red each year. While we can blame consumer spending, that’s also a necessity in keeping the economy humming. The reality is that, in our modern economy, lots of workers aren’t going to be able to build wealth while paying a ~15% tax that only benefits them indirectly (in propping up retiree spending, which is similarly vital to the economy).Now, sure, the well-off will be able to afford it. But what if they choose to just go elsewhere? While lots of countries are in a similar situation to the US, not all are. What’s to keep our elite workers from decamping to places offering fairer pension taxes (and no/limited wealth taxes)?But if taxes don’t go up, one or more of three other things will have to happen:The national debt will have to absorb the deficits.Retirement ages will have to go up.Benefits will have to come down.The first option has long been a go-to. But this strategy has its limits. At some point the interest payments will eat up such a large part of government income that either tax rates or inflation will have to spiral (possibly both). There’s also the risk that foreign buyers lose their appetite. They currently buy 30% of issued bonds. What if they look at the US economy’s trajectory and begin to say ”eh, no thanks”?The second and third solutions seem to me the most prudent. But which politician can run on that platform and survive electorally? And if they do manage to get enough votes from angry young people, what’s that going to do to intergenerational relations? Just imagine Thanksgiving after 2028, when a Millennial / Gen Z wave has brought in a POTUS promising to raise the retirement age to 75.The bottom line is that none of these solutions are great. We have overspent on the wrong things and have been too willing to trade tax cuts for votes. And soon those chickens will come home to roost.(Oh, and did I mention that many state and corporate funds are actually in even worse shape? The overall situation is much, much more awful.)—Note: It’s somewhat unfair to credit/blame any one POTUS for government spending under their leadership. It’s more a congressional function which the POTUS has a limited set of controls over. But I judged it uncessary to get into that level of detail here, as no combination of parties has ever successfully shrunk federal spending in nominal dollars since 1965 anyway (when Democrats held all three houses, interestingly enough). But that reduction was modest, didn’t factor inflation / GDP gains, and only lasted the single year. The point is that, whatever their rhetoric, very few politicians of either party have ever actually been serious about reducing government spending or paying down the debt. It’s all just theater.