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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

You're going to have a hard time generalising "European" here, because there's a lot of countries and nothing is set (at all AFAIK) at the EU level.

I lived in the UK and Sweden and both countries had massive private pension systems that you pay into ("optionally"). The state pension is a tiny sliver of that.

In fact, in Sweden I can go look at all my private pension funds in one place; here's a picture of that: https://i.imgur.com/rMw6W44.png

You see the tiny red sliver at the bottom: that's my state pension ("Allmän Pension") which is less than 1,850 USD per month before income taxes. That doesn't even include the inflation that will happen between now and 65 (assuming I will be permitted to retire at 65 which seems unlikely).

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Fair, my strong impression has been that average people in most countries in Europe put relatively less into private pension schemes than equivalent Americans. I know that is the case in the UK, for example.

My state pension alone in the US is notionally ~$4k per month when I reach retirement age (plus all the other subsidies and free stuff). Despite this, Americans are pretty much indoctrinated from birth to assume that won’t exist and to have alternative plans. This leads to the interesting phenomenon where many people that weren’t particularly well off during their working years find themselves relatively flush with money during retirement because they were operating from a pessimistic model.

That leads to a much bigger phenomenon where seniors are catered to in the US with products and services and treated with a lot of attention and ads while many seniors in Europe (especially Eastern Europe) live on government mercy and in horrible conditions.

> My state pension alone in the US is notionally ~$4k per month

That's huge! Does the US state pension scale based on your lifetime contributions (amount, not just years)? Because int he UK, if I retired with a full state pension today, I'd get $1345 per month. To achieve this you need to have contributed about a minimum threshold per year for 35 years. There is no way to increase this amount, only decrease it by not meeting the 35 years requirement. So to me, given the rhetoric about the US, $4k per month state pension along is insane.

> You see the tiny red sliver at the bottom: that's my state pension ("Allmän Pension") which is less than 1,850 USD per month before income taxes.

Did you mean to type per month here? That's an enormous state pension.

I did mean monthly, but you’re missing a lot here.

I know previous inflation does not infer future inflation But if we use the previous 30 years of inflation to project the future, this money would be worth $882-ish today.

I’m not sure how you live, but that doesn’t cover ground rent on my apartment and food today.

The major point is that private pensions are common, and they are investments made by banks (I think similar to a 401k). I think its mainly Germans who don’t like private pensions.

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