Your Greed is Robbing Your Future Self

Look at that stressed out old man. He's probably worried about money.

I just read an article that makes me sick. Here is the link. It's long, but you can get by without reading the whole thing to get the gist of it. Basically, the world is entering a massive retirement crisis. The baby boomers are starting to retire and government benefits are not going to be able to keep up with the strain on the system.

The article points to three main problems that are converging to create the perfect storm of retirement crises.¹

Here are the three main points:

     - Countries are slashing retirement benefits and raising the age to start collecting them. . .

     - Companies have eliminated traditional pension plans that cost employees nothing and guaranteed

     them a monthly check in retirement.

     - Individuals spent freely and failed to save before the recession, and they saw much of their

     wealth disappear once it hit.

I added some italics to point out something important. Which of those three factors has the largest effect on your eventual financial position? Which of those factors do you have even a small amount of control over? The answer is the same: your individual spending and saving rates.

If you give in to rampant lifestyle inflation and don't save for retirement then you have no one to blame but yourself and your bad decisions. Now I know that stuff happens. The economy goes bad. We start wars. People get sick or lose their jobs. But if you save a sufficient percentage of your income you will be prepared for those types of problems and be able to weather the storm.

The reality of modern life in a first world country is that ninety percent of the things that we have are really wants, not needs. Our greed has made us almost unable to distinguish between the two. Allow me to quote a wiser man than I am, "If we are not careful, it is easy for our wants to become needs. Remember the line 'There, there, little luxury, don’t you cry. You’ll be a necessity by and by.'”2

I would submit that many, if not all of us, are already there to some degree. So don't worry so much about the national debt or excessive spending on entitlements. You can't control everything that will happen. However, if you can manage your own greed then this retirement crisis doesn't have to ruin you.

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1 Do you remember the movie "Perfect Storm"? It was awful.^↩
2Joe J. Christensen, April 1999 Conference "Greed, Selfishness, and Overindulgence"^↩