Canada

I was in a strong Reddit karma position. Early retirement was looking good, but then the rug was pulled. Now I'm back to work here having to start all over again.

I started my retirement planning at age 17. The plan was to be able to retire to the lakeside and a workshop somewhere between 55 and 60.

Fucked up large scale economic "management", scammy financial advise, and a random financial setback pretty much made all that planning and effort a waste of time and money.

Here we are, 66 years old, crossing our fingers as we take a stab at being retired. We are lakeside and there is a shop, but only because we tossed everything aside a decade ago and used what was left of our retirement savings to buy a 1968 mobile home on a leased lot and found local employment. The workshop is an old park bathroom and shower that I got in exchange for figuring out how to move it to make room for a new one.

I'm sure that retirement planning is little more than a scam. Someone made money on all those investments, but it sure wasn't us! I'm actually glad I never had a company pension plan because it means there was nothing else for some shark to steal by declaring bankruptcy.

Yeah, I plan to work until I'm dead.

I'm curious to know if they realize that inflation consistently fell for nearly a year. The last reporting period was the first time we have seen an increase since June 2022, and even then it was only a meager 0.1pp increase. There is little to suggest that one outlier datapoint is a reversal in the trend. Further, with nearly a year of decline, there would have to be a seismic shift in the inflation rate just to return to June 2022 levels, let alone go higher.

I wonder if many meant: If prices keep rising...?

I'm getting slowly closer to fifty and have been saving for a long time, but ever creeping inflation and interest is seriously hampering it. The loans I should have been able to pay off became almost unsustainable over the pandemic and now I have to throw everything at the interest and can barely touch the principle.

I'm still making it and I'm in the luckiest ten percent or so of the xennials. I'll actually be able to retire. But if it's hard for me, what does that say about the other 90%?

As someone approaching 40, I feel like I've watched retirement slip from my grasp over the last 5 years. At this point, I fully expect to be working until I die.

To play devil's advocate, retirement is a fairly recent phenomenon. It's only come about en masse in the last 2 centuries, and most people would get a few years of retirement before they died if they were lucky.

Retirement age was set at 65 in the 1930s but back then life expectancy was only 60. Now it's 81. So saving for retirement was much easier to do.

Plus those extra 15 years of life are some of the most expensive for the society in terms of a healthcare burden. Assuming life expectancy continues to rise, we're going to have to stomach later retirement, barring some technological breakthrough like robot nurses