nosuchreality
Well-known member
daedalus said:Clearly we've never met. We're not bad with money; while I'm not saying we couldn't do better, for the most part we don't indulge in most of what you listed on even a monthly basis, unless you consider a $5 rotisserie chicken or food court meal from Costco once a week to be a real splurge. Ok, you got me at Amazon, but it's worth it to only have to make it to Costco once a week for the perishables.
We know our finances today inside and out and better than most, and we've stayed on top of it for 15 years. But I'm completely stymied by the challenge of planning for a retirement when there's a huge range of completely plausible outcomes between now and then. What will the market do? Will we actually get the social security we've been promised? Will health care cost us $1000 a month or $4000? I can envision a future where we struggle to get by and a future where we die with millions in the bank, and everything in between, and none of it would be far-fetched through the lens of history.
Well Dae, you're doing better than 80% of the people who literally don't have control of their finances and your burn rate is clearly under control. It's the future hypothetical burn you're sweating.
Surprisingly quite a few high earners in that boat. While we all should think about increasing our income streams, most of those require a financial nest egg to do so and 50% literally have none and 80% effectively have little outside of their 401ks or houses. They're struggling to make ends meet today.
Your future issue sounds like that is primarily one boogie man, health care. I struggled with it for a long time in our planning. Then I chilled out. I realized my future scenarios, while in line with historical reality would require a future Great Depression or the continued health care increases would effectively leave the 99% without healthcare insurance. Simply not going to happen. We will ignore it as long as possible, but healthcare has a ugly price reckoning coming.
There's other future scenarios to plan for too, you can insure against them now, but nnot later, i.e. senior assisted living care, dementia care, etc. Dementia care today can easily run $8000-$9000/month or more for a decent place.
You can work until you can't trying to cover the scenarios, or look at them, insure if possible and then just recognize that certain things are essentially just having lost a dice roll. End of life care presently, IMHO, seems designed to drain all assets from the estate. Sad to say, but if you want to pass wealth to the next generation, do it early, do it often, and pray you die quickly.
The other option is to configure a passive business that will provide health care. That'll take money to start, but go for self sustaining eventually.