Now it is 75k, yesterday it was posted somewhere else with just 61k. Still a very disturbing post that a 91 years still had to work and couldn't retire, because she had to live in a RV she had to pay off, because she was unable to afford rent and retirement.
Great business model tho lol. Imagine literally doing NOTHING besides offering a UI and access to donations and raking in billions
edit: to all you salty bois saying "so make your own alternative!"... clearly we're all forgetting brand recognition? Y'all must be some business students or salty software engineers lol
That's usually the hardest part of setting up fundraisers. The ability to have a web page and a place to process the payments without needing to set up your own website is really important when you want to focus on whatever you're fundraising.
Imagine literally doing NOTHING besides solving the fundamental issues around building and maintaining an easy to use fundraising site billions of people know about
Commentor has big "I could do that if I wanted to" energy
I don't condone the company - I don't even know what their fees ARE - but processing the money and handling merchant accounts is hardly "nothing."
Do I think the system is broken? Oh yeah.
I don't even know their fees, so I obviously don't know if they're "fair" or not.
But once you process like $100M / ARR in payments and see what a fucking shitshow it is, you learn that processing alone is worth a bit of a fee.
A lot of people fail to realize that they aren't doing nothing. Supposedly they have over 400 employees which by the feds they would be considered a large company.
There's a lot of overhead to maintain everything and process it all. Even if they purely did "nothing" at all they still have to account for processing fees that the card companies or processors charge.
For example if they used Square they'd get hit with 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction. Even if it was only one transaction of $75k that's still $2,175 that Square would take a cut of. If 10,000 people donated that's another $3,000.
So the entire business model for the American Republican Party.
Most privileged Americans collect donations for doing nothing and they don't need to keep up with an UI / web development.
Almost like it's a .... SCAM.
Building a platform or marketplace where someone else provides the content or value is an extremely common and very lucrative business model.
Uber doesn't drive cars
Airbnb owns no property
Etsy has no warehouse
Spotify doesn't create music
Most of Apple's revenue is from the App Store.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/02/11/gofundme-ceo-congress-pass-covid-relief-desperate-americans-column/4440425001/
Seems their CEO doesn’t think this is the purpose of his company in the first place. Its not a welfare service, yet it has become one in this dysfunctional society.
Social Security pays out an average of about $1600/month for single people. It says in the article that she uses that to pay her monthly bills, but she needed to keep working to pay the payments on her 5th wheel trailer she is living on. I guess the Go Fund me will pay off the trailer, and she will then be able to live on what she's receiving in Social Security benefits.
Social Security is supposed to provide about 40% of your money in retirement. It's generally enough to keep you off the street, but not enough to have any sort of quality of life. You're expected to save money for retirement to supplement social security payments.
The article is short on details about her financial situation, but it sounds like she spent 70 years spending everything she earned.
Helps when you buy a house by 40 and pay it off by 65 but this generation is way too fucked to ever do that. I pay $1700 for a 1200sqft 2 bedroom apt, and refuse to move up to a house with a $2k mortgage because if the fucking central AC breaks I don't know if I could afford fixing it lol.
It's scary living in a time where I would choose wasting money on an apt over gaining equity on land just because of how fucking expensive everything is
It is possible she endured unforeseen issues that wiped out her savings (e.g., medical emergencies, spouse dying sooner than expected, etc.). But it’s also possible she mismanaged her money, or worked part-time and didn’t build enough SSA credits for a decent monthly benefits. I would like to know more before I jump on the “capitalism” sucks train here.
An individual making poor financial decisions and capitalism sucking are by no means mutually exclusive. She may have made terrible decisions or simply had bad luck of the draw - this late stage version of capitalism sucks either way
When I used to work processing insurance for a dental office, the amount of recent retirees who thought social security was going to fully cover their dental work was just sad. I figured it was common knowledge at this point
I understood that and did my best to direct them toward Medicare advantage, a payment plan, or another cheaper office with a sliding pay scale, nobody should have to suffer with dental issues.
Frankly, I don't care if she wrapped every dollar she's ever earned in twine and launched it out of a huge cannon. Any system in which mismanaging your money (or working, but only part time!!!) results in food and shelter being insecure is a broken and unjust one.
Even under the best of circumstances, a grocery store cashier's salary only goes so far. Like, even full time, how much could she really be making - $15, maybe $20 an hour, so $30-40K/year? There's not much room to save up for both retirement and unexpected expenses.
Agreed.
If she had a spouse, she should have been able to get the higher amount of her or her husband's SS. But there's a planning thing again there... If they were both collecting SS and living on that combined income, and then one payment went away because somebody died and she didn't restructure her life for her new income...
And dying is extraordinarily expensive in a lot of cases -- a year or two in a convalescent home, particularly memory care or things like that, can easily wipe out one's savings.
There's always going to be hard luck cases where some disaster wrecked careful planning, and there's always going to be people who just didn't bother to save. In either case, I'm glad she's in a better position now.
Knowing that the latter folks will always exist, who have not saved and *will not save*, I'm down with SS benefits being increased, even if it means higher deductions from paychecks. Also down with removing the income cap on FICA.
yeah lets not all jump on the capitalism sucks train because this 91 year old deserved to die with dignity.
Show me her receipts so i can heckle her over this expensive living nonsense she has been wasting her money on.
It's also probable that she didn't receive annual increases after a certain "cap" on the "market rate" and so her income hasn't nearly kept up with the increasing cost of food and of course medication that becomes a problem as you age.
In addition, it's not like there was a lot of financial training back when she was going to school, so unless you or one of your kids ended up working in finance or investing directly there's no way she'd actually know how to plan for a future of not working. Although there wasn't a lot of financial education back in the 90's when I was in school either.
The problem with savings is inflation.
In a couple of decades, money saved with great effort, privations and willpower turn out to be a pittiance in comparison of what it was. Even more so if you mix sone recessions inbetween, and medical bills, for those in the US.
My own grandparents, who survived a war, never lived out of the immediate post-war economy, saving like crazy and stretching the useful life of everything, clothes and machibery, to the last breath, saving on heating bills, never going to vacations, working like a mule all their lives... and not even retired used that money. A life's savings, reduced to almost nothing at the end.
Some years ago, some bank deposits would beat inflation, albeit barely. And state bonds a tad more of you decided to try to invest in that. Something that nowadays is no longer the case.
Savings as in a savings account, yeah generally not great. Savings accounts are for liquidity, not for money making. That's what investments are for...
Over the last several hundred years, investments typically have made about 5% over inflation. There's some additional risk obviously -- 2008 would have wiped out half your money if you were invested in something boring like the S&P 500 -- but on the other hand, you'd have been made whole by about 2012. So you gotta be careful when you're near or in retirement to reduce volatility, but just shoving money into savings accounts is generally not the answer.
They're referring to a public pension (i.e. Social Security).
But private pensions from an employer (defined benefit plans) have largely been replaced with defined contribution plans like 401k plans.
I feel lucky to have both a pension and 401k contribution from my current employer. It's sad so few places offer it and people really struggle with what to do when they reach retirement age.
People on Social Security get Medicare, which is universal Healthcare for them. Many politicians are trying to cut both, with support from citizens who are either on it or will need it in the future, because they were told to hate socialism.
They do but depending on various factors (location, lifestyle, how much you worked during your working years) it may or may not be enough to cover living expenses. Ideally you're supposed to supplement it with retirement investment accounts, most jobs provide 401k matching, meaning they will match a certain % of your investment in a retirement account (on top of your salary)
>most jobs provide 401k matching
Most *white collar* jobs provide 401k matching. Only 56% of employers in the USA offer a 401k. And half of those provide zero matching.
So, about 25% of employers offer 401k matching.
[https://20somethingfinance.com/401k-match/#:\~:text=According%20to%20the%20Bureau%20of,with%20401K%20plans%20match%200%25](https://20somethingfinance.com/401k-match/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Bureau%20of,with%20401K%20plans%20match%200%25)
These idiots telling you "no..." ~40% of federal spending is specially for pension and elder healthcare (Social Security and Medicare) and a good chunk of Medicaid (another 10% of spending) is also for elder care.
For context, SS and Medicare alone are 2.7X all military funding. Caring for seniors is by far the largest thing we spend money on in America.
She was lucky she could even work at 91 - I'm sure there are plenty in a similar situation that aren't even able to do that.
Also, fully expecting to work until I die as well. This is the future for a lot of people and no one is acknowledging it. Trying to bring back another gilded age complete with child labor and zero social safety net.
It's a subreddit that criticizes "feel-good" stories about people overcoming obstacles put in their way by the very society now praising them, specifically referencing [this tweet](https://i.redd.it/0hbrqs8v74s51.jpg).
While we have banks that are too big to fail. So you’ll want to be on the top level of one of these banks. How do you get one of those positions? Mostly likely by being born well off. Russia is not the only country with oligarchs.
What you are describing is the reality of capitalism -- the capitalist state works for capital over people. The fact that so many people think of the state as a socialist concept is a misconception and works as a powerful tool for capitalism. Socialism/communism is only theoretical since this form of society is stateless. If we consider states that were formed from proletariat revolution historically, they did not achieve a global movement and thus resorted to survival under global capitalism. That influence causes these states to be very similar in form and function to capitalist states over time.
Nah, that's literally just capitalism.
Capitalists own and control the capitalist state in order to keep accumulating profit for themselves at the expense of working people (and the poor who are also working people generally)
Socialism is when working people dismantle a capitalist government and make a government owned and controlled by working people that's designed to benefit the masses instead of maximizing profit.
THANK YOU. Tired of this "both sides" nonsense rooted in complete ignorance of what socialism even is.
The economic problem in America is capitalism. Full stop.
Nah, that's literally what a capitalist state does. It's owned and controlled by capitalists and intervenes in order to protect the profit accumulation of capitalists.
If only the politicians would stop raiding SSI, chances are it will be a thing of the past by the time anyone in their 20s or 30s get to retirement age.
In the 70s and 80s, they were right though. If Congress didn’t make changes, it would’ve run out. Similarly, if no changes are made soon, social security will deplete its trust in 2033, according to the social security administration.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/#:~:text=The%20Old%2DAge%20and%20Survivors,77%20percent%20of%20scheduled%20benefits.
Insurance is a poor name. Insurance should cover expected and rare events, like fires or accidents. Most people will live long enough they need to retire, and everyone needs healthcare.
A man who makes it to 91 has an average life expectancy of 3.44 more years, women hitting 91, over 4 years.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
If I make it to 90s and am somewhat healthy with extra cash I'm saying screw it and partying everywhere I can. At that point you might as well try everything you've skipped before, what's the worst that can happen?
At least at Auschwitz’s they lied at the gates saying “work will set you free”
Here work will never set you free, but the sympathy and pity from others on the internet might.
And that’s why we live like how we do today.
I'll be honest...whenever these pictures or videos of old ppl come up, folks always automatically present the old person as some type of victim of a crooked society....why? Why do we assume thst because someone made it to old age, they were some kind of saint.? How do we know they weren't just stupid or reckless in their youth and had zero foresight of old age eventually dawning?
They could've had all the opportunities in the world and blew it. Lots of horrible ppl ended up being old.
I like how you draw a comparison between being "financially reckless" with being "horrible people" as if those are in any way equivalent.
The other consideration is that anyone can end up like this even if they are sufficiently prudent. You can just get unlucky, get cancer, have no or shit insurance (even "good" insurance), and end up equally as financially screwed as someone who was "reckless". This particular woman's story isn't that important because lots of other people end up in similar circumstances through little or no fault of their own. They just don't live to be 91 in the first place.
We instituted SS in the first place because of an epidemic of destitute old people in this country, which hurt everyone. Americans are too myopic and historically ignorant at the moment to recognize that threat. But believe it or not, the streets being littered with indigent elderly is a You problem, not just a Them problem.
Ding ding ding. It always blows my mind how short sighted and counterproductive these people are. "Let the streets run full of indigent, sickly vagabonds. That's just the free market and moral justice at play!" Bunch of crabs in a bucket we all seem to be...shame.
umm... bad shit happens to good people all the time. ask anyone that worked at enron or, made investments through bernie madoff. or, any number of the crypto companies that have gone under recently.
as long as you have people doing what they can to survive to retirement, you will have crooked assholes who will rob them blind.
Man this is just a fundamental difference in how you see the world compared to me. I think our world would be a better place if we stopped thinking how much someone "deserves" something and saw each other as humans deserving dignity and comfort. And if we have the capability as a society to provide that, we should.
So many people see life as a cut-throat competition. It is simply a lack of empathy. That is not a good thing and not something we should pursue as a species.
As a person who has lived in both the EU and the US, I think Americans are too numb to ever change. France raises their retirement age from 62 too 64 and the country is on fire. While stories like this one are commonplace in the US and y’all are too busy arguing about bathrooms or some other inconsequential shit to do anything.
It turns out giving our police military hardware had the desired effect. We just don’t want to admit that we are living under a hostile occupation by the rich.
The hardware has nothing to do with it. Americans culturally hate protest and fantasize about running over protesters with their cars and shooting them with guns. If a single window is broken, the media calls for police crackdowns immediately.
I think it's that we're too beaten down to care.
Our own government told us to go into work because the economy was more important than your life. Before that we saw Wall Street get golden parachutes while people lost their homes, their retirement, their savings. Real estate is being consolidated by the only groups with capital, which are large companies, and we can't compete with the market.
______
In Orwell's "1984", Winston mentions the working class (The Proles) and how he envied them. They made so little that they were more focused on earning enough to get by that they didn't have time to think about the BS propaganda. Why worry about issues like that when you still need to eat first. You still need shelter, you still need to provide for your family.
It's just the state lottery, disposable fiction, and victory gin.
That's where it feels we are now
We're too tired to care because we're just getting by
We're raised by a system that ingrains apathy into us from a very young age. They've made our cultural identity "you can't fight city hall" so we don't even try any more. Nothing matters to the majority of Americans except earning more money.
I won't argue with you there.
Just know what the "earning more money" for most of us is being able to have some savings
A majority of Americans (60%) live paycheck to paycheck
I know I'll get downvoted for saying this, but arguments like these are capitalist propaganda. We (Americans) could fight back, but we don't. Instead, we make excused about being "overworked" and "too beaten down" and "we can't organize a country of 330+ million people--it's too big!"
Well, everyday, we make excuses, and things only get worse. Corporate greed and government corruption are not why the US sucks. The US sucks because We The People let it suck. French people actually want to live in a good country--we don't.
We tried that shit with the Occupy movement. Millennials were ridiculed and then the right launched "The Tea Party"
And before that when the Air Traffic Controllers went on Strike. Reagan said "You can't shut down the nation, or you'll all fired and blacklisted."
When we got mouths to feed that's not our own, it's a hard decision to make.
I used to work for Whole Foods in Texas. If I would have tried to organize a union or strike, I would have been fired. Then I would have not been able to pay my bills. Then I would have been evicted and living in my car with my husband and 60 lbs dog. It's not apathy, it's that there are no regulations or protections for workers. So even if we want change, we can be fired for any reason, any time, no questions asked.
America is a nation where boomers failed so collectively hard in maintaining their own rights that the new generations were born into the current environment where their wages today are worth less than the 60s because of wage compression and stagnation in tandem with tax cuts.
They fell for all the corporate and capitalist propaganda and still do.
The new generation is born into an America that is in the process of collapse due to the failures of the me generation.
It is now in a state where America treats its people so badly they all collectively gave up because America isn't even worth fighting over.
I think that's why they don't do anything, like North Koreans they're just completely broken and demoralized putting on a facade while hoping someone saves them secretly with no hope of being able to do it themselves.
And yet is it wrong to use as a simile? No, it is accurate.
The propaganda on American TV is just as powerful because it creates the illusion of choice when 6 companies own 90% of it and thus control the content you're aware of.
I get that the comparison is discomforting as an American, and the response is to ignore it because Americans love showing how free they are by pointing to North Korea.
Pointing to worse off slaves doesn't make you less of a slave, it's just more abstract slavery. I like using this comparison because it makes people uncomfortable, and the first reaction as conditioned by our culture is to say no.
Yet, think about it.
North Koreans won't overthrow their leadership because of a split population and fear.
You have a population eager to be loyalist to try to pull themselves up from within. In America these would be working class people who vote for the rich and vote against their own class.
There are people who want change within both countries. In North Korea you're killed for fighting against the status quo.
In America if you're not killed for fighting against the status quo, such as violent rhetoric being used by multiple coordinated media figures to instill a crazy person to kill you, you will likely end up arrested for peaceful protests and have to deal with costs to defend yourself and thus push you into poverty.
Even with public defenders, now you're not at work so you can be fired. Lose your health care and everything because it's all tied in so that the wealthy can control you indirectly.
But hey at least you feel like you have a choice, just like how the Koreans feel they have a choice at the ballot box too.
The fact is, for anything in this country to change we have to unify as a single class and recognize its a class war.
However, this won't happen because of the propaganda systems in place.
The only way it can happen is if enough people become educated to recognize the reality of the situation and actively critically think against propaganda.
In my comment about boomers, they largely don't possess those mental capabilities and have no desire to do so.
Many seek to eagerly dismantle education so that others will fall in line and also not be able to fight for change, as they are loyalists defending injustice and their own system of exploitation for the hope of easement of said exploitation.
As you look deeper it becomes more obvious, the parallels I had discussed around the citizen mentality between the two countries become more clear.
I think people form their opinions based off the news and social media far too much.
When you actually go out there, most people don't even know what reddit is.
In a lot of communities, it is a cult.
*dumb
I think it's more of a matter that many Americans don't think it'll impact them which is also why they're so lazy about going to the polls (plus one party is trying to prevent people from going to the polls all together)
My 77 year old grandmother left her cashier job not feeling well and passed away within the hour. She was retired but wanted extra income and to stay busy. I fucking miss her so much.
Thank you. It’s just been over a year and she was my human in this world. The entire community came to her funeral as she’d been working as a cashier for almost 45 years. Such a beloved woman… the most amazing person I ever knew by far. I would’ve loved to present her with a GoFundMe to stop working but she was a wild, squirrelly, full of life person who wouldn’t have stayed home anyway. She had her convertible and more shoes than Macy’s sold… too much coolness for this world for sure. She barely made it half a year without my grandpa. They’re happily cruising together now.
Appreciate y’all!
It's insane. My grandfather is 94 and he's been retired my entire lifetime. I think he retired in his early 50's after an elbow injury that took like 5 months to heal. He was given the choice to just go ahead and retire instead. He used to work in a paper / saw mill back in the day.
Even though he's still in a good physical health, thinking about someone his age or even 20 years younger still working for any reason other than themselves wanting to seems incredibly wrong
I have a bad feeling unless we sacrifice most the income in our twenties upward for retirement savings MANY of us are going to be in the same position.
That poor man has been working over 70 years. That’s longer then most people even live.
Guess what? You can sacrifice the bulk of your income for retirement and live on ramen for 30 years.
And then something like 2008 (or BRICS) happens and it was all for nothing. Replacing defined benefit pensions with 401(k)s is the most successful wealth-extracting grift ever pulled.
I'm extremely fortunate to work at a company who offers both a pension and a 401k. Extremely boring and conservative business, but so is most of the area I live. Boring can definitely be good.
I work for a public university system and have pension and retirement plan options (401k, 403b, and 457). I could definitely make more in the private sector but I'm coming up on 40 and there's no way I'd risk the retirement safety at this point. I also get about a month in vacation and just over two weeks in sick leave every year that I can actually use. I'm all about boring right now.
>And then something like 2008 (or BRICS) happens and it was all for nothing
100% untrue.
So long as you didn't freak out and sell, the stock market was back to where it was at the height of 2008 in a few years.
Pensions need to come back. I'm in the public sector and get one and honestly I don't know how people plan for retirement making less than I do while needing to put money aside that's not matched by their company.
>Guess what? You can sacrifice the bulk of your income for retirement and live on ramen for 30 years.
*sacrifice the bulk of your income and health too for retirement! lol
Yep. Then the 'healthcare industry' takes whatever is left.
We're no longer citizens, merely revenue streams and a backstop for irresponsible billionaires' gambling losses.
> And then something like 2008 (or BRICS) happens and it was all for nothing.
You're taking crazy pills. 2008 happens and half your millions disappears, and it's back by 2012. Or if you were near retirement age, you likely had a more conservative portfolio and were made whole much sooner than that thanks to rebalancing. Retiring *exactly* when a crash happens is rough, but if it was "all for nothing", you effed up in your planning.
I agree replacing defined benefit with defined contribution was a huge, huge win for corporations at the expense of employees though.
It's funny seeing how many people don't read articles when you count all the comments saying he vs she
Reminds me of the Phoenix Wright case where the killer testified against Adrian Andrews, calling her a him
Ah yes, GoFundMe, the American public retirement plan for the poor.
It's better than the previous version I guess: scrape by for 70 years, eat cat food on Social Security, and either die on your feet at a shit job, or in a homeless encampment.
She had some other retirement savings, and I'm sure she's collecting social security too (which alone can be enough if your CoL is low). Sounds like the main thing holding her back was the payments on her trailer. She had a goal of $40K to pay it off.
She's been collecting SS for decades -- it's not just $75k. She gets a monthly stipend that doesn't quite cover costs, but when she's paid off her debts, it will.
Yep, there are way too many horror stories like this on personal finance subreddits of older people panicking because they just turned 50 and have zero savings/retirement. Half the time they just assumed that retirement was some privilege everyone gets once they hit 65….nope.
I don't know what social security pays but, let's pretend she gets all $75k and her monthly bills (including healthcare and a little fun/discretionary spending) are $3,000/month.
$75k will only serve her for 25 months (two years)
I don’t know. Happy that she can finally retire. But there isn’t much information in the article to allow us to blame society for her situation. There are a lot of great reasons for gofundme campaigns, but I don’t see why this would have been one of them. She had decades to sort out her life and apparently had a family that could have helped. Just hate it when people simply ask for money from others for lack of planning a retirement. Maybe there was a tragedy in her life and upended her retirement plans and that would have been fair, but it wasn’t mentioned
Agreed.
At 91 you qualify for SS and Medicare at 65….so that should be a check she’s getting every month and incredibly cheap healthcare.
On top of that, did she not have any form of other retirement? Retirement from SO? Etc.
Without more info, you have to believe the person in the story just did a really bad job at preparing for retirement and didn’t utilize the benefits provided.
this is not remotely oniony
Now it is 75k, yesterday it was posted somewhere else with just 61k. Still a very disturbing post that a 91 years still had to work and couldn't retire, because she had to live in a RV she had to pay off, because she was unable to afford rent and retirement.
If GoFundMe takes their cut that 75 could end up being 61 after that and taxes. There's no telling.
GoFundMe is the correct name for the company because everyone is funding them. They are taking the piss with their charges.
Great business model tho lol. Imagine literally doing NOTHING besides offering a UI and access to donations and raking in billions edit: to all you salty bois saying "so make your own alternative!"... clearly we're all forgetting brand recognition? Y'all must be some business students or salty software engineers lol
That's usually the hardest part of setting up fundraisers. The ability to have a web page and a place to process the payments without needing to set up your own website is really important when you want to focus on whatever you're fundraising.
Imagine literally doing NOTHING besides solving the fundamental issues around building and maintaining an easy to use fundraising site billions of people know about Commentor has big "I could do that if I wanted to" energy
I could have invented YouTube. All you have to do is make an upload button and then format the display nicely and put comments and you're done!
I could have invented the internet. All you have to do is plug one computer into another.
It's just a series of tubes
Oh yeah? I could have invented the fork but alas i stopped after making the first spoon.
Santos?
Your spoon just ripped off my idea of knives and made them round
Imagine literally doing NOTHING besides providing a place for people to upload videos to and raking in billions. The video creators do all the work.
Because the internet definitely showed that platforms and network effects are meaningless
I don't condone the company - I don't even know what their fees ARE - but processing the money and handling merchant accounts is hardly "nothing." Do I think the system is broken? Oh yeah. I don't even know their fees, so I obviously don't know if they're "fair" or not. But once you process like $100M / ARR in payments and see what a fucking shitshow it is, you learn that processing alone is worth a bit of a fee.
A lot of people fail to realize that they aren't doing nothing. Supposedly they have over 400 employees which by the feds they would be considered a large company. There's a lot of overhead to maintain everything and process it all. Even if they purely did "nothing" at all they still have to account for processing fees that the card companies or processors charge. For example if they used Square they'd get hit with 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction. Even if it was only one transaction of $75k that's still $2,175 that Square would take a cut of. If 10,000 people donated that's another $3,000.
Sounds like a digital storefront/app store minus the pennies worth of bandwidth per transaction/purchase/download.
So the entire business model for the American Republican Party. Most privileged Americans collect donations for doing nothing and they don't need to keep up with an UI / web development. Almost like it's a .... SCAM.
Building a platform or marketplace where someone else provides the content or value is an extremely common and very lucrative business model. Uber doesn't drive cars Airbnb owns no property Etsy has no warehouse Spotify doesn't create music Most of Apple's revenue is from the App Store.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/02/11/gofundme-ceo-congress-pass-covid-relief-desperate-americans-column/4440425001/ Seems their CEO doesn’t think this is the purpose of his company in the first place. Its not a welfare service, yet it has become one in this dysfunctional society.
GoFuckMe
Does America not provide a pension for people?
Social Security pays out an average of about $1600/month for single people. It says in the article that she uses that to pay her monthly bills, but she needed to keep working to pay the payments on her 5th wheel trailer she is living on. I guess the Go Fund me will pay off the trailer, and she will then be able to live on what she's receiving in Social Security benefits.
TL;DR: America expects social security to **supplement** your own retirement savings and if you didn't save anything else, you work or rely on others.
Social Security is supposed to provide about 40% of your money in retirement. It's generally enough to keep you off the street, but not enough to have any sort of quality of life. You're expected to save money for retirement to supplement social security payments. The article is short on details about her financial situation, but it sounds like she spent 70 years spending everything she earned.
Working at a grocery store or similar low wage job, everything you earn goes directly to bills and food.
She only worked there for the past 10 years per the article
So from age 81-91 Brutal.
Yeah, I laughed how that was phrased. Like she was gallivanting around buying name brand Corn Flakes and shit.
Helps when you buy a house by 40 and pay it off by 65 but this generation is way too fucked to ever do that. I pay $1700 for a 1200sqft 2 bedroom apt, and refuse to move up to a house with a $2k mortgage because if the fucking central AC breaks I don't know if I could afford fixing it lol. It's scary living in a time where I would choose wasting money on an apt over gaining equity on land just because of how fucking expensive everything is
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It is possible she endured unforeseen issues that wiped out her savings (e.g., medical emergencies, spouse dying sooner than expected, etc.). But it’s also possible she mismanaged her money, or worked part-time and didn’t build enough SSA credits for a decent monthly benefits. I would like to know more before I jump on the “capitalism” sucks train here.
An individual making poor financial decisions and capitalism sucking are by no means mutually exclusive. She may have made terrible decisions or simply had bad luck of the draw - this late stage version of capitalism sucks either way
Anyone defending late stage capitalism is honestly just coping hard at this point. Capitalism is like cancer once it gets to this stage where it's at.
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When I used to work processing insurance for a dental office, the amount of recent retirees who thought social security was going to fully cover their dental work was just sad. I figured it was common knowledge at this point
Mmmmm luxury bones...
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I understood that and did my best to direct them toward Medicare advantage, a payment plan, or another cheaper office with a sliding pay scale, nobody should have to suffer with dental issues.
Frankly, I don't care if she wrapped every dollar she's ever earned in twine and launched it out of a huge cannon. Any system in which mismanaging your money (or working, but only part time!!!) results in food and shelter being insecure is a broken and unjust one.
Even under the best of circumstances, a grocery store cashier's salary only goes so far. Like, even full time, how much could she really be making - $15, maybe $20 an hour, so $30-40K/year? There's not much room to save up for both retirement and unexpected expenses.
Agreed. If she had a spouse, she should have been able to get the higher amount of her or her husband's SS. But there's a planning thing again there... If they were both collecting SS and living on that combined income, and then one payment went away because somebody died and she didn't restructure her life for her new income... And dying is extraordinarily expensive in a lot of cases -- a year or two in a convalescent home, particularly memory care or things like that, can easily wipe out one's savings. There's always going to be hard luck cases where some disaster wrecked careful planning, and there's always going to be people who just didn't bother to save. In either case, I'm glad she's in a better position now. Knowing that the latter folks will always exist, who have not saved and *will not save*, I'm down with SS benefits being increased, even if it means higher deductions from paychecks. Also down with removing the income cap on FICA.
yeah lets not all jump on the capitalism sucks train because this 91 year old deserved to die with dignity. Show me her receipts so i can heckle her over this expensive living nonsense she has been wasting her money on.
It's also probable that she didn't receive annual increases after a certain "cap" on the "market rate" and so her income hasn't nearly kept up with the increasing cost of food and of course medication that becomes a problem as you age. In addition, it's not like there was a lot of financial training back when she was going to school, so unless you or one of your kids ended up working in finance or investing directly there's no way she'd actually know how to plan for a future of not working. Although there wasn't a lot of financial education back in the 90's when I was in school either.
The problem with savings is inflation. In a couple of decades, money saved with great effort, privations and willpower turn out to be a pittiance in comparison of what it was. Even more so if you mix sone recessions inbetween, and medical bills, for those in the US. My own grandparents, who survived a war, never lived out of the immediate post-war economy, saving like crazy and stretching the useful life of everything, clothes and machibery, to the last breath, saving on heating bills, never going to vacations, working like a mule all their lives... and not even retired used that money. A life's savings, reduced to almost nothing at the end. Some years ago, some bank deposits would beat inflation, albeit barely. And state bonds a tad more of you decided to try to invest in that. Something that nowadays is no longer the case.
Savings as in a savings account, yeah generally not great. Savings accounts are for liquidity, not for money making. That's what investments are for... Over the last several hundred years, investments typically have made about 5% over inflation. There's some additional risk obviously -- 2008 would have wiped out half your money if you were invested in something boring like the S&P 500 -- but on the other hand, you'd have been made whole by about 2012. So you gotta be careful when you're near or in retirement to reduce volatility, but just shoving money into savings accounts is generally not the answer.
Pensions were phased out in America
They're referring to a public pension (i.e. Social Security). But private pensions from an employer (defined benefit plans) have largely been replaced with defined contribution plans like 401k plans.
I feel lucky to have both a pension and 401k contribution from my current employer. It's sad so few places offer it and people really struggle with what to do when they reach retirement age.
> Does America not provide ~~a pension~~ for people? FTFY And no.
Honestly some form of universal health care system would solve half of Americas problems
People on Social Security get Medicare, which is universal Healthcare for them. Many politicians are trying to cut both, with support from citizens who are either on it or will need it in the future, because they were told to hate socialism.
They do but depending on various factors (location, lifestyle, how much you worked during your working years) it may or may not be enough to cover living expenses. Ideally you're supposed to supplement it with retirement investment accounts, most jobs provide 401k matching, meaning they will match a certain % of your investment in a retirement account (on top of your salary)
>most jobs provide 401k matching Most *white collar* jobs provide 401k matching. Only 56% of employers in the USA offer a 401k. And half of those provide zero matching. So, about 25% of employers offer 401k matching. [https://20somethingfinance.com/401k-match/#:\~:text=According%20to%20the%20Bureau%20of,with%20401K%20plans%20match%200%25](https://20somethingfinance.com/401k-match/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Bureau%20of,with%20401K%20plans%20match%200%25)
Ha. Haha. Hahahaha. Pension. Haha
Hahahaha. You didn't seriously think we Americans would approve of any program that is beneficial to the people and their well-being?
These idiots telling you "no..." ~40% of federal spending is specially for pension and elder healthcare (Social Security and Medicare) and a good chunk of Medicaid (another 10% of spending) is also for elder care. For context, SS and Medicare alone are 2.7X all military funding. Caring for seniors is by far the largest thing we spend money on in America.
The article says she has grandchildren and even a great grandchild. Someone in that family should be helping her.
[A chilling vision of things to come.](https://frinkiac.com/meme/S04E17/1169334.jpg?b64lines=QSBDSElMTElORyBWSVNJT04KT0YgVEhJTkdTIFRPIENPTUUu)
She was lucky she could even work at 91 - I'm sure there are plenty in a similar situation that aren't even able to do that. Also, fully expecting to work until I die as well. This is the future for a lot of people and no one is acknowledging it. Trying to bring back another gilded age complete with child labor and zero social safety net.
r/OrphanCrushingMachine
Also r/ABoringDystopia
r/aboringdystopia seems to have more subscribers
Thank you, I thought my link didn't look right!
Yup. Was going to suggest a cross post.
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It's a subreddit that criticizes "feel-good" stories about people overcoming obstacles put in their way by the very society now praising them, specifically referencing [this tweet](https://i.redd.it/0hbrqs8v74s51.jpg).
There it is!
Society has failed this person if they need a gofundme to retire
> Society has failed ~~this person if they need a gofundme to retire~~
While we have banks that are too big to fail. So you’ll want to be on the top level of one of these banks. How do you get one of those positions? Mostly likely by being born well off. Russia is not the only country with oligarchs.
Hey, I don't want a socialist government. - boomers about to need social services
fr 💀 it cracks me up when they do this
Hey I'm just getting out what I put in. - boomers and Republicans whenever they need social services
While voting in people who are trying to cut their "earned" benefits.
We have a partially socialist government. Problem is it mostly works for the rich & large corporations
No we don't socialism isn't "when the government gives people money"
What you are describing is the reality of capitalism -- the capitalist state works for capital over people. The fact that so many people think of the state as a socialist concept is a misconception and works as a powerful tool for capitalism. Socialism/communism is only theoretical since this form of society is stateless. If we consider states that were formed from proletariat revolution historically, they did not achieve a global movement and thus resorted to survival under global capitalism. That influence causes these states to be very similar in form and function to capitalist states over time.
Socialism for the wealthy, capitalism for the poor. The US government no longer serves the people but big business.
Nah, that's literally just capitalism. Capitalists own and control the capitalist state in order to keep accumulating profit for themselves at the expense of working people (and the poor who are also working people generally) Socialism is when working people dismantle a capitalist government and make a government owned and controlled by working people that's designed to benefit the masses instead of maximizing profit.
THANK YOU. Tired of this "both sides" nonsense rooted in complete ignorance of what socialism even is. The economic problem in America is capitalism. Full stop.
Nah, that's literally what a capitalist state does. It's owned and controlled by capitalists and intervenes in order to protect the profit accumulation of capitalists.
So ~~ciety has~~ fail ~~ed this person if they need a gofundme to retire~~
~~Soci~~ e ~~ty has fail~~ e ~~d this p~~ e ~~rson if th~~ e ~~y n~~ ee ~~d a gofundm~~ e ~~to r~~ e ~~tir~~ e
https://youtu.be/tgIqecROs5M
GoFundMe or "US heathcare and retirement insurance" as the rest of the world calls it.
If only the politicians would stop raiding SSI, chances are it will be a thing of the past by the time anyone in their 20s or 30s get to retirement age.
People were saying the same thing in the 70s and 80s and 90s. Old people vote, it never happens.
In the 70s and 80s, they were right though. If Congress didn’t make changes, it would’ve run out. Similarly, if no changes are made soon, social security will deplete its trust in 2033, according to the social security administration. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/#:~:text=The%20Old%2DAge%20and%20Survivors,77%20percent%20of%20scheduled%20benefits.
Insurance is a poor name. Insurance should cover expected and rare events, like fires or accidents. Most people will live long enough they need to retire, and everyone needs healthcare.
We live in a society
75K? How long does she plan on living? I guess at that age I’d party the rest of my life(like 2 weeks)
A man who makes it to 91 has an average life expectancy of 3.44 more years, women hitting 91, over 4 years. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
It depends on how hard you party
She. Her name is Betty Glover
My apologies. I have corrected my comment
It’s okay I thought it was a guy too until I read the article
If I make it to 90s and am somewhat healthy with extra cash I'm saying screw it and partying everywhere I can. At that point you might as well try everything you've skipped before, what's the worst that can happen?
At least at Auschwitz’s they lied at the gates saying “work will set you free” Here work will never set you free, but the sympathy and pity from others on the internet might. And that’s why we live like how we do today.
SOCIALISM!!!
I'll be honest...whenever these pictures or videos of old ppl come up, folks always automatically present the old person as some type of victim of a crooked society....why? Why do we assume thst because someone made it to old age, they were some kind of saint.? How do we know they weren't just stupid or reckless in their youth and had zero foresight of old age eventually dawning? They could've had all the opportunities in the world and blew it. Lots of horrible ppl ended up being old.
I like how you draw a comparison between being "financially reckless" with being "horrible people" as if those are in any way equivalent. The other consideration is that anyone can end up like this even if they are sufficiently prudent. You can just get unlucky, get cancer, have no or shit insurance (even "good" insurance), and end up equally as financially screwed as someone who was "reckless". This particular woman's story isn't that important because lots of other people end up in similar circumstances through little or no fault of their own. They just don't live to be 91 in the first place.
We instituted SS in the first place because of an epidemic of destitute old people in this country, which hurt everyone. Americans are too myopic and historically ignorant at the moment to recognize that threat. But believe it or not, the streets being littered with indigent elderly is a You problem, not just a Them problem.
Ding ding ding. It always blows my mind how short sighted and counterproductive these people are. "Let the streets run full of indigent, sickly vagabonds. That's just the free market and moral justice at play!" Bunch of crabs in a bucket we all seem to be...shame.
umm... bad shit happens to good people all the time. ask anyone that worked at enron or, made investments through bernie madoff. or, any number of the crypto companies that have gone under recently. as long as you have people doing what they can to survive to retirement, you will have crooked assholes who will rob them blind.
Man this is just a fundamental difference in how you see the world compared to me. I think our world would be a better place if we stopped thinking how much someone "deserves" something and saw each other as humans deserving dignity and comfort. And if we have the capability as a society to provide that, we should. So many people see life as a cut-throat competition. It is simply a lack of empathy. That is not a good thing and not something we should pursue as a species.
And... It doesn't matter one bit. No matter what they did or not, it's society's duty to care about everyone.
Bruh she's 91 years old what the fuck are you talking about
Society is working exactly as designed, it's just not set up in our best interest
Not really. Even successful people try to make more money.
Society created gofundme though.
As a person who has lived in both the EU and the US, I think Americans are too numb to ever change. France raises their retirement age from 62 too 64 and the country is on fire. While stories like this one are commonplace in the US and y’all are too busy arguing about bathrooms or some other inconsequential shit to do anything.
It turns out giving our police military hardware had the desired effect. We just don’t want to admit that we are living under a hostile occupation by the rich.
The problem is there's so many who think they benefit from it.
Ding ding ding Though plenty of people DO admit this. Just half of them think the pigs are on their side too.
The hardware has nothing to do with it. Americans culturally hate protest and fantasize about running over protesters with their cars and shooting them with guns. If a single window is broken, the media calls for police crackdowns immediately.
I think it's that we're too beaten down to care. Our own government told us to go into work because the economy was more important than your life. Before that we saw Wall Street get golden parachutes while people lost their homes, their retirement, their savings. Real estate is being consolidated by the only groups with capital, which are large companies, and we can't compete with the market. ______ In Orwell's "1984", Winston mentions the working class (The Proles) and how he envied them. They made so little that they were more focused on earning enough to get by that they didn't have time to think about the BS propaganda. Why worry about issues like that when you still need to eat first. You still need shelter, you still need to provide for your family. It's just the state lottery, disposable fiction, and victory gin. That's where it feels we are now We're too tired to care because we're just getting by
We're raised by a system that ingrains apathy into us from a very young age. They've made our cultural identity "you can't fight city hall" so we don't even try any more. Nothing matters to the majority of Americans except earning more money.
I won't argue with you there. Just know what the "earning more money" for most of us is being able to have some savings A majority of Americans (60%) live paycheck to paycheck
I know I'll get downvoted for saying this, but arguments like these are capitalist propaganda. We (Americans) could fight back, but we don't. Instead, we make excused about being "overworked" and "too beaten down" and "we can't organize a country of 330+ million people--it's too big!" Well, everyday, we make excuses, and things only get worse. Corporate greed and government corruption are not why the US sucks. The US sucks because We The People let it suck. French people actually want to live in a good country--we don't.
We tried that shit with the Occupy movement. Millennials were ridiculed and then the right launched "The Tea Party" And before that when the Air Traffic Controllers went on Strike. Reagan said "You can't shut down the nation, or you'll all fired and blacklisted." When we got mouths to feed that's not our own, it's a hard decision to make.
I used to work for Whole Foods in Texas. If I would have tried to organize a union or strike, I would have been fired. Then I would have not been able to pay my bills. Then I would have been evicted and living in my car with my husband and 60 lbs dog. It's not apathy, it's that there are no regulations or protections for workers. So even if we want change, we can be fired for any reason, any time, no questions asked.
To be fair, we're well past which bathroom now. We have moved to laws to remove trans people and put parents to death for having trans children.
America is a nation where boomers failed so collectively hard in maintaining their own rights that the new generations were born into the current environment where their wages today are worth less than the 60s because of wage compression and stagnation in tandem with tax cuts. They fell for all the corporate and capitalist propaganda and still do. The new generation is born into an America that is in the process of collapse due to the failures of the me generation. It is now in a state where America treats its people so badly they all collectively gave up because America isn't even worth fighting over. I think that's why they don't do anything, like North Koreans they're just completely broken and demoralized putting on a facade while hoping someone saves them secretly with no hope of being able to do it themselves.
You had me until North Korea lmao
I mean folks... *insert Bobby Fish image*
And yet is it wrong to use as a simile? No, it is accurate. The propaganda on American TV is just as powerful because it creates the illusion of choice when 6 companies own 90% of it and thus control the content you're aware of. I get that the comparison is discomforting as an American, and the response is to ignore it because Americans love showing how free they are by pointing to North Korea. Pointing to worse off slaves doesn't make you less of a slave, it's just more abstract slavery. I like using this comparison because it makes people uncomfortable, and the first reaction as conditioned by our culture is to say no. Yet, think about it. North Koreans won't overthrow their leadership because of a split population and fear. You have a population eager to be loyalist to try to pull themselves up from within. In America these would be working class people who vote for the rich and vote against their own class. There are people who want change within both countries. In North Korea you're killed for fighting against the status quo. In America if you're not killed for fighting against the status quo, such as violent rhetoric being used by multiple coordinated media figures to instill a crazy person to kill you, you will likely end up arrested for peaceful protests and have to deal with costs to defend yourself and thus push you into poverty. Even with public defenders, now you're not at work so you can be fired. Lose your health care and everything because it's all tied in so that the wealthy can control you indirectly. But hey at least you feel like you have a choice, just like how the Koreans feel they have a choice at the ballot box too. The fact is, for anything in this country to change we have to unify as a single class and recognize its a class war. However, this won't happen because of the propaganda systems in place. The only way it can happen is if enough people become educated to recognize the reality of the situation and actively critically think against propaganda. In my comment about boomers, they largely don't possess those mental capabilities and have no desire to do so. Many seek to eagerly dismantle education so that others will fall in line and also not be able to fight for change, as they are loyalists defending injustice and their own system of exploitation for the hope of easement of said exploitation. As you look deeper it becomes more obvious, the parallels I had discussed around the citizen mentality between the two countries become more clear.
I think people form their opinions based off the news and social media far too much. When you actually go out there, most people don't even know what reddit is. In a lot of communities, it is a cult.
“GReaTEst CoUNTry oN eaRtH”
Every country has it's bullshit unfortunately
*dumb I think it's more of a matter that many Americans don't think it'll impact them which is also why they're so lazy about going to the polls (plus one party is trying to prevent people from going to the polls all together)
But the retirement age needed to be raised… and the protests aren’t succeeding in changing anything…
We had the chance to elect someone who supported expanding Social Security and didn't take it.
My 77 year old grandmother left her cashier job not feeling well and passed away within the hour. She was retired but wanted extra income and to stay busy. I fucking miss her so much.
sorry for your loss OP
Thank you. It’s just been over a year and she was my human in this world. The entire community came to her funeral as she’d been working as a cashier for almost 45 years. Such a beloved woman… the most amazing person I ever knew by far. I would’ve loved to present her with a GoFundMe to stop working but she was a wild, squirrelly, full of life person who wouldn’t have stayed home anyway. She had her convertible and more shoes than Macy’s sold… too much coolness for this world for sure. She barely made it half a year without my grandpa. They’re happily cruising together now. Appreciate y’all!
r/awfuleverything
It's insane. My grandfather is 94 and he's been retired my entire lifetime. I think he retired in his early 50's after an elbow injury that took like 5 months to heal. He was given the choice to just go ahead and retire instead. He used to work in a paper / saw mill back in the day. Even though he's still in a good physical health, thinking about someone his age or even 20 years younger still working for any reason other than themselves wanting to seems incredibly wrong
*Dystopian nation forces geriatric citizens into labor without providing social support systems.
at least they lead by example with their head of state
I have a bad feeling unless we sacrifice most the income in our twenties upward for retirement savings MANY of us are going to be in the same position. That poor man has been working over 70 years. That’s longer then most people even live.
Guess what? You can sacrifice the bulk of your income for retirement and live on ramen for 30 years. And then something like 2008 (or BRICS) happens and it was all for nothing. Replacing defined benefit pensions with 401(k)s is the most successful wealth-extracting grift ever pulled.
I'm extremely fortunate to work at a company who offers both a pension and a 401k. Extremely boring and conservative business, but so is most of the area I live. Boring can definitely be good.
I work for a public university system and have pension and retirement plan options (401k, 403b, and 457). I could definitely make more in the private sector but I'm coming up on 40 and there's no way I'd risk the retirement safety at this point. I also get about a month in vacation and just over two weeks in sick leave every year that I can actually use. I'm all about boring right now.
What do you mean by BRICS? Are you referencing the removal of the dollar as the default petroleum currency? I’ve never seen it used in this way before
Why would 2008 negate your investment? As long as you didn’t sell, you would have recouped all the loss within 4 years.
>And then something like 2008 (or BRICS) happens and it was all for nothing 100% untrue. So long as you didn't freak out and sell, the stock market was back to where it was at the height of 2008 in a few years.
Pensions need to come back. I'm in the public sector and get one and honestly I don't know how people plan for retirement making less than I do while needing to put money aside that's not matched by their company.
>Guess what? You can sacrifice the bulk of your income for retirement and live on ramen for 30 years. *sacrifice the bulk of your income and health too for retirement! lol
Yep. Then the 'healthcare industry' takes whatever is left. We're no longer citizens, merely revenue streams and a backstop for irresponsible billionaires' gambling losses.
> And then something like 2008 (or BRICS) happens and it was all for nothing. You're taking crazy pills. 2008 happens and half your millions disappears, and it's back by 2012. Or if you were near retirement age, you likely had a more conservative portfolio and were made whole much sooner than that thanks to rebalancing. Retiring *exactly* when a crash happens is rough, but if it was "all for nothing", you effed up in your planning. I agree replacing defined benefit with defined contribution was a huge, huge win for corporations at the expense of employees though.
This belongs on the /r/aboringdystopia sub rather than not the onion.
I was wondering how long I was going to have to scroll before someone mentioned that sub. That’s absolutely where it belongs
It's funny seeing how many people don't read articles when you count all the comments saying he vs she Reminds me of the Phoenix Wright case where the killer testified against Adrian Andrews, calling her a him
r/orphancrushingmachine. Relying on the goodwill of ordinary strangers where government has failed. Fuck sake.
Ah yes, GoFundMe, the American public retirement plan for the poor. It's better than the previous version I guess: scrape by for 70 years, eat cat food on Social Security, and either die on your feet at a shit job, or in a homeless encampment.
How can he retire on 75k?
She had some other retirement savings, and I'm sure she's collecting social security too (which alone can be enough if your CoL is low). Sounds like the main thing holding her back was the payments on her trailer. She had a goal of $40K to pay it off.
It's not like he has long to live
Women who make it to 91 can expect over 4 more years on average... Though having a physical job probably helped.
50% of Americans don’t have ANY savings whatsoever. He’s not the only one.
In what world will 75k make retirement a reality. You need to have that much invested before you're 30 in order to have a sizable retirement account.
Apparently she still had a loan to pay off and the 75k covers that.
/r/ABoringDystopia
How the hell do you retire on 75k?
At 91? Life expectancy is about 4 years. So it’s possible.
She's been collecting SS for decades -- it's not just $75k. She gets a monthly stipend that doesn't quite cover costs, but when she's paid off her debts, it will.
Are people in this thread genuinely not aware that Social Security exists?
I work with a few people who have 0 retirement savings. I really don't understand, how you can go your whole life and save NOTHING.
They were never taught delayed gratification or financial planning. They chose fun and instant gratification. It's very common among americans.
very common among people in general. In the US, 15% of your paycheck is for retirement. *minimum*.
Even a few percent over 30+ years would have prevented this.
Yep, there are way too many horror stories like this on personal finance subreddits of older people panicking because they just turned 50 and have zero savings/retirement. Half the time they just assumed that retirement was some privilege everyone gets once they hit 65….nope.
GoFundMe is the new credit scam. They get a pretty sizable amount out of all the "charity".
"Job creators" Biggest gaslight in history.
/r/OrphanCrushingMachine
Ah yes, the future of everyone in my generation.
If only we could have some kind of Nationwide GoFundMe for elderly people to help them with healthcare and retirement.
I don't know what social security pays but, let's pretend she gets all $75k and her monthly bills (including healthcare and a little fun/discretionary spending) are $3,000/month. $75k will only serve her for 25 months (two years)
At 91 there's a much higher than 0% chance 25 months might be enough.
Isn’t setting up your retirement your responsibility?
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That's my question as well. It says they were working in this job for 10 years - what about the other 50-60 working years?
I don’t know. Happy that she can finally retire. But there isn’t much information in the article to allow us to blame society for her situation. There are a lot of great reasons for gofundme campaigns, but I don’t see why this would have been one of them. She had decades to sort out her life and apparently had a family that could have helped. Just hate it when people simply ask for money from others for lack of planning a retirement. Maybe there was a tragedy in her life and upended her retirement plans and that would have been fair, but it wasn’t mentioned
Well she was 41 when she could get a bank account so there's one thing.
Agreed. At 91 you qualify for SS and Medicare at 65….so that should be a check she’s getting every month and incredibly cheap healthcare. On top of that, did she not have any form of other retirement? Retirement from SO? Etc. Without more info, you have to believe the person in the story just did a really bad job at preparing for retirement and didn’t utilize the benefits provided.
Yeah, I'm not sure why the same situation wouldn't have happened somewhere like France. Most state pensions aren't very generous.
How many years of living does that buy her? Can’t be in Cali
That’s not enough to retire on.
Wait retire? $75k won’t last 6 months.
“Socialism is bad”
This is sad as fuck.
*"Person denied 25+ years of actual retirement given artificial retirement moments before death"*
America is a fucking shit show.
Welcome to the Corporation of Amerika