Seriously, if you are hitting your 401K for cash you either no long believe the stock market will be functioning in the near future... or you have already tapped all other assets and you need the cash to survive. Either way, its somewhat insulting to scold them. Its going to get a lot worse than this. And I'm the optimistic one in the room!
Yuck. Sorry about all the typos. Cat helping.
“Keep you 401! Live in your car!”
I doubt people can understand what you wrote, so I’ll help a bit.
The US debt is GIGANTIC. There is no way that we will ever make progress paying it down. We have half of this country that are pure takers (welfare and everything related), and we even have half of us FReepers as almost-pure takers (i.e., “don’t you dare touch my Social Security”).
So our deficits continue, our debt is TOTALLY unmanageable, but there remains a HUGE pot of gold in retirement accounts - enough to cover the ENTIRE national debt, and them some (probably).
So the feds know this, and they know that they MUST get their hands on the money (as opposed to telling FReepers that the country is really, really, broke). So they TAKE the money and replace it with an annuity (i.e., a monthly payout, like Social Security). That will work for another 5 to 10 years (at which most can retire), but after that, we’re STILL broke and spending like mad, and have no more pots of gold - and then we collapse, and INFLATION finally sets in, and all our money is worth, maybe 25 cents on the dollar (at best, 10 cents in other countries that have been through this) - and the idea of buying a plasma next year goes away - and the dream will be affording some meat so our kids don’t look quite as gaunt...
I haven’t drawn mine down, but I stopped contributing to it when I realized that using plastic for groceries now for something 30 years down the road made no sense. I’m paying down debt, but if I ever am able to contribute again I wouldn’t go any further than the company match.
I have no doubt that one of the fixes for social security is that it will be based on means, and the grasshoppers will be whooping it up after setting aside nothing with money set aside by the ants (while the ants get reduced payments because they’re “rich”). People have to adjust to the current socialism by getting as far off the grid as possible; I know there are limitations as to what can be done, but playing by the rules has turned into a sucker’s game in which the sucker too often watches his/her hard-earned money given to useless garbage.
Contrast the Katrina response to the Sandy response; Sandy happened to “wealthy white people” as far as the government and their media are concerned, and the response has been predictably sluggish.