You’re retirement is already fucked its only a matter of time for the AI bubble to pop and after that the dollar being removed as the world reserve currency.
They don’t want us to retire, they want to literally work us to death. Cheaply as possible I might add.
401(k)s were always a wealth extraction vehicle for the wealthy, they just want a bigger cut now. A pension was an earned and guaranteed benefit. A 401(k) is a gamble for bootraps fetishists.
This is all about having a bigger pool of marks to be left holding the bag when the AI bubble pops. I think capital knows by now that regular retail investors aren’t going to buy the hype enough to buy them out right before the burst, so they need to force them to do so to make sure they keep their money. It’s the same bullshit that had SpaceX trying to get listed on the index funds, only bigger.
That’s why they want the change. If you lose the money in your 401(k), it is not gone. It’s just that someone else has it. If you retire in poverty, someone else has an additional Ferrari.
That’s an over-simplification of the mechanics of wealth transfer, but yes, wealth transfer is their goal here, and they know what they’re doing, so it will work if they get their way, which they may given how captured our government is by the Epstein class.
TL;DR - They want to allow riskier and more expensive investments into 401(k) accounts.
Many 401(k) options can be pretty crappy as it is now, and as boring as it can be, we need to ensure we understand what we’re signing up for if we don’t expect to be screwed, just as in any other financial situation. Learn the basics of investment saving, set up your own brokerage account, and do a regular sweep of your funds into your personal low fee account as frequently as your employer plan lets you.
Yes, it sucks that they are attempting to remove guardrails, but this shouldn’t be anything new for anyone with a retirement account. If you don’t understand what you are investing in, you’ve already likely failed yourself. Everyone should at minimum be able to understand the terms of your 401(k) policy, know what different asset classes are, and know what expense ratios are. Getting informed keeps us safe. Trusting an employer or financial product salesman is not the way to go.
For anyone wanting to start on basics, from simple to more involved:
Seconding Bogleheads’ general advice. I’ve recomended The Investment Answer, which gives broadly the same advice.
From looking at the 5 points in the summary, it sounds like similar advice. It’s been all I needed to do realistically well for myself, and once you set things up, if you’ve been honest with yourself in your risk levels, you set it and forget it for a couple decades, since so many sites let you automate everything.
It really doesn’t need to be hard, I think a lot of people think it’s going to be and just flat out don’t want to learn, even when I try to ELI5 to them. I’m honest with them and will show them my balance and holdings to show I’m not blowing smoke, but I don’t know if anyone but my wife and ex have ever listened, and even then I think it was just so they didn’t need to listen to it anymore. 🙄
They want us to die penniless. First they strap young people with tens of thousands in student loan debt, suppress wages, raise taxes and prices higher and higher, heavily promote video games and turn citizens into Dopamine junkies, then transition them to rigged gambling and prediction market apps, do massive targeted advertising timed precisely to the consumers’ personal aspirations, making them irresistible, etc, over an entire lifetime.
It’s all designed to extract every last penny out of our pockets by the time we’re old. And just in case you had enough money to put aside into a safe retirement fund, so that you’d have a nest egg, even if you burned through everything else, now they want to get their mitts on that, and steal that, too.
They aren’t moustached villains, actively plotting people’s misery for their joy.
They’re simply making choices that are good for them personally, as anyone would. They aren’t thinking of any broader externalities and effects on people they’ve never met.
Few are cartoon villains; few are thinking of externalities. But the people pushing for this change know what they’re doing. They are actively plotting wealth transfer from the working class to the capitalist class.
Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
— Michael Parenti
“as anyone would”
I guess altruism is a made up thing?
Well it is, just like greed is a made up thing.
In a proper world, altruism wouldn’t exist.
It only does because nature is uncairing, and society can be cruel.But being made up doesn’t matter to my point. People can create a problem with one hand, while trying to fix it with another, having never noticed the connection.
I would’ve been fine with your comment if you hadn’t included that. I don’t doubt these people are trying to act in their own self interests.
But when you say “as anyone would” it implies everyone is horribly selfish and never takes other people into account when making decisions ever and this is just accepted common knowledge, which it isn’t.
Anyone and everyone are very different things.
Yes, the words are different, but the meaning was effectively the same. “People are inherently selfish and we all know this”
I wasn’t saying selfish. More myopic, or ignorant.
Animals are altruistic. Just search for _____ saves person. You will find lots of instances of animals saving humans. Not just dogs and cats either. Ravens, crows, pigeons, elephants dolphins, beluga, and humpbacks are all well documented displaying protective behaviors when predators are around humans that they know.
Of course they do. Altruism was made up by all social species. A few others even copied it.
What pedantic definitions to be as reductive as possible. You are not a good person.
What a thought stopping dismissal, to be as righteous as possible.
You don’t know what makes a good person.We dont accept the premise of assholes here
It’s clear you lot think you don’t fart.
