My retirement fund that I just started was worth $15k in December of 2021. Then, May of 2022, our area was hit really hard. My retirement plan went down to $7k. Today, it’s worth $11k. I lost $4k on my retirement plan. It’s invested in total market funds, some tech, some big cap companies, and healthcare. But every sector has been ravaged by the stock market changes.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    Only 32% of people have 401k accounts.

    45% of 18-29 year olds have a retirement account. That number keeps rising to 77% of people 60+ having a retirement account. source

    You don’t need a 401k account to save for retirement. You can do this same savings/investing in an IRA or even an brokerage account (but you wouldn’t get the tax benefits). There are ZERO employer requirements to opening an IRA, you just have to be someone that earns money.

    • snooggums@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      you just have to be someone that earns money.

      Earns enough money to set some aside for retirement.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        Earns enough money to set some aside for retirement.

        Do you literally not even have $1 in your pocket that you earned for yourself? Thats all it takes to open an IRA and start saving for retirement.

        • snooggums@lemmy.world
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          11 days ago

          You do understand a significant portion of the population doesn’t have a dollar to spare when they live paycheck to paycheck, right?

          • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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            11 days ago

            You do understand a significant portion of the population doesn’t have a dollar to spare when they live paycheck to paycheck, right?

            Listen friend, its entirely possibly you started off with good intentions in this thread, but somewhere along the line it looks like you got so concerned with “being right” or “getting zingers” that your responses got more and more useless and simply argumentative for arguments sake. I’m human, I’ve been there. Look where you started off this line of conversation with this:

            So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.

            The way I know you went down the wrong path is that if you were genuine with your argument, you would have started HERE with your comments about people not being able to save anything for retirement. Instead, you attacked a legitimate way to save for retirement for those that can save for retirement. Worse, you did so from a position of ignorance, but then attacked the response that informed you how your stated position was inaccurate.

            The other possibility is that you started your whole rant without any thought to having a good faith conversation about the benefits or challenges to Americans saving for retirement. That would make you a straight up Troll. I don’t that thats who you are, so maybe just let this conversation thread die because its not producing anything productive for you and its otherwise a waste of time for everyone.

            • snooggums@lemmy.world
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              11 days ago

              Or I completely disagree with the idea of individuals investing for their retirement as a base expectation when the options available are not universal nor affordable for half the population.

              Your post comes across as dismissive of anyone criticizing the current system.

              • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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                11 days ago

                Or I completely disagree with the idea of individuals investing for their retirement as a base expectation when the options available are not universal nor affordable for half the population.

                Then you should have led with that. I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to explain how to use the system to someone not interested in any part of the system. None of your arguments are about the mechanisms of the system, but instead lack of its universal applicability. You weren’t interested to learning how the system can work, you’d already dismissed it from the get-go.

                Your post comes across as dismissive of anyone criticizing the current system.

                Your posts come off as trolling because you’re arguing about particular internal steps to the current system when you don’t even care about it.