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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

This is excellent reasoning. "Retirement" as it is thought of today, is a fairly recent phenomenon and was originally thought to be quite brief.

From my experience long periods scattered through your life is better. I was able to retire in my early 30s and have just engaged in intense multi-year periods of work since, always with gaps of a year or more afterwards. It allowed me to spend more time as a parent, more time with my spouse, and to spend time doing fun activities I will not be able to do in my 70s.

I think some professionals will have trouble adapting to this because there will be a strong impetus to "advance their career" rather than take a gap. But encouraging this mode may encourage people to take these gaps, and in fact improve the balance vs today's system in which it's mostly women who have trouble advancing because of time off with the kids.

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I have had a bit of a forced mid-life (37) retirement for the last 6 months due to being laid off.

It's actually been really nice because I'm lucky enough to have enough savings accessable, so it's been a nice low-stress time to recover from working at a start up.

What's absurd to me is much of the money I've saved is in a traditional IRA that I reasonably can't touch without penalty until I'm 65 without doing some advanced financial planning like a Roth ladder which requires planning at least 5 years in advance. Hard to plan for being laid off....

My parents died at 68. That they paid social security for their entire careers and got so little is absurd.

It's such a shame to me that culturally we emphasize career over life experiences and expect people to wait until their life is ending to enjoy it.

> My parents died at 68. That they paid social security for their entire careers and got so little is absurd.

Do their children (i.e. you and your siblings if any) get to access it? If yes, it’s not a complete waste.

Nope, my brothers and I inherited their private savings, but no public benefits.

My mom received a portion of my father's air force pension after he passed, but not us since we weren't dependents any longer.

I take it contributing to SS is voluntary? Else it’s kind of like robbery.

When you take a job with a pension, you run the risk of not being able to collect that pension if you die early. But it’s your choice to take the job.

SS is withheld in every paycheck by your employer and you can't opt out. The employer pays half and the other (6.2%) is withheld from the employee's gross income. Currently totaling 12.4% of income.

https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc751

Wishing you better luck getting back into a job than I had - months 1-6 of job searching were straightforward enough, but after that, each successive month started making me feel like I was being judged for continuing to look for a job instead of taking the first thing that would give me "current" experience.

Yeah, starting to feel that for sure.

I don’t think that was the point of Social Security.

It was so that people no longer physically able to work wouldn’t starve to death.

And yes it’s very sad that some people don’t live long enough to get the benefits of the program.

If i remember correctly the Canadian system for this seems sensible; there is a tax deferred account but you can pull it out at any time without additional penalty (you pay income tax of course). I think you can't put it back in though. At some age (70ish?) you have to start taking it out somewhere in the 5-10% range.

It is unfortunate that the modern retirement, in the US, is "work until you're incapable of working", then survive your last lingering years using up whatever savings you managed to stash away.

Yes, it was always thus for the poor, but the poor is now almost all of us. Whatever happened to the middle class?

> Yes, it was always thus for the poor, but the poor is now almost all of us.

The poor has, for all of history, always been almost all of us.

> Whatever happened to the middle class?

The petit bourgeois middle class of capitalist(-ish, in the case of the modern mixed economy, but it does not differ on this point) society has always been a narrow segment, it is “middle” between the working class and the haut bourgeoisie, not “middle” in the sense of median or modal experience.

The working class have generally been insecure; there was a brief period of broader, particularly white, working class prosperity post-WWII that the right, particular since Reagan, has both attacked via anti-labor policy and used the effects of their attacks on the White working class to fuel racial resentment that they’ve used as the cover for further attacks on the working class behind racist appeals.

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