- Travel
- See your grandkids/pay for their tuition etc
- Medical bills increase as you get older

And a whole host of other things.

With that being said, I think a gross income of $60,000 each year is enough to sustain me. Or less

But apparently that amount means I need to save 3.5 million by the time I retire because I plan on living until the age of 90 :P

(P.S. I’m a Pig too :) Although I like to say “Piglet” because it’s cuter or “Boar”)

The “market” where everyone is trying to generate money is like a party that cannot end because no one wants it to. It is like a run away train that continuously speed up, where everyone is excited about the speed and no one realizes the train needs to stop. Eventually it will hit an end… and crash.

The same trend is happening with the way we deal with ourselves, each other, the family-concept, the government, and the planet. We are so involved with what exist now that we cannot let go of what just will not work for the greater whole.

I cannot help but feel how things are cannot last. Because of that and if things stay the same, humans will not last (which may not necessarily be a bad thing). To change that, and that is, IF people realize they need to change, it seems there is no other way than a collective epiphany or satori, where we realize what the F we are doing and slow down to figure out what the F we really want to do.

Because most people only realize they need to change upon a traumatic situation, like cancer, or someone close dying, or near death situation, my prediction is that, things will get worse on average before getting better. By this, I mean we will not know how long this will take, or if it will happen… in our lifetime.

I was talking in regard to not just the big picture but the entire picture. Hopefully it makes sense.

When you say, how are “they” making money off this, I think it’s actually deeper than that. “We” are making money from this, not “they”.

For most people, retirement is only a plausible concept if we get “a little help” from, in most cases, the stock market. Imagine a world with no investments, and the whole concept of retirement falls rather flat. Saving 10% of your salary so you can somehow survive on that paltry 10% twenty years in the future, when inflation has made that 10% virtually worthless? Not so appealing is it.

But when we are told that 10% will grow eight-fold in 30 years to become 80%, then it all makes sense, and is very alluring. Yet without that eight-fold gain the whole proposition doesn’t make any sense.

So we all have a vested interest in the great retirement experiment living on. We need our investments to go higher for retirement to be plausible, and our children will need to as well. As always, when you take things at the limit, I suspect one generation will find they are the ones at the end of the line. At that moment, who knows, perhaps government will intervene to force people to invest, or perhaps we will finally find a meaningful place in society for our seniors.