Asklemmy

My retirement plan is eating bugs in the woods because it beats working until I die.

I'm not sure I'm old enough to answer this, but retirement scares me, and I basically don't know if retirement is financially likely or reasonable. Even if you invest enough into a 401k early enough, you have a pretty good chance of having serious health problems at some point in life that will probably take most of that money.

Basically the situation is bleak, so I try to focus on doing what I can to improve my situation without dooming about what I can't control.

How do you deal with the uncertainty if the money you saved for retirement will be enough for the rest of your life?

I live in a country with a pension sachem and it still scares the fuck out of me

This were not as big of and issue. Pensions were better. You stll had brokers but investing was more costly and fewer people did it.More use of banks. PE ratios were far lower and dividend payouts higher. It was a lower risk less volatile time. You could still reseach investments either you could go to the libraray, your broker woyld send you photo copies, and stock prices were in the paper. You could phone and mail order mutual funds and information. There were investing magazines. Geopolotics was more stable too but no less scary. Jobs were more stable too and the wealth divide less.

Also do not forget Compuserve had forms and etrade access in early 90s well before the internet explosion.

Well, in, my case first there was communism, so the state provided us with a pension regardless of who worked how much and what was happening in general.

And then there was the collapse of the USSR and in general after a while everyone realized that they would just work until death. And so it happened.

Save more than you need.

Run fiscal history simulations (several programs do this for you). If I had invested this money in 1900, how would this have fared? If I had invested this money in 1901, how would this have fared. Etc.

Accept that you can’t plan for everything except your own resilience. You may have to adjust your spend if things are looking harder than you had planned for. You’ll be fine. At least that’s what I tell myself.

My fiscal plan has me running out in 0% of historical scenarios, which is belt and braces. Still need to save a lot before I can retire according to that fiscal plan.

In my state there's a ton of state ran resources for seniors. It'd not perfect but its better than most. My taxes go into it and I've seen the end result. Very happy with paying them.

My parent's generation all had pensions. You didn't have to worry about it unless the accountants cooked the books and didn't manage it honestly. I was too young to know all the details, but I gather that system got upended by two things: 1) several pension funds that went bust and 2) shift from people working at one place forever to job-swapping which made pensions basically impossible (before computers).