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Comment by sojournerc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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.

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.

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