how does the 401k work? is it like your retirement pay?
here we get something like 700€/month even if you didn't work for a day. and it's something around 1500€/month with normal 40 year long working career. but some rich can get like 3k and more in a month for retirement
but now they're talking about how we won't get it at all. birthrate is at all time low and there are so many old people that maybe when I am at that age I don't get anything? scary future!
The 401k is for retirement, yes. It's an account you pay into, pre-tax (and then that income is not taxed), which you can only access at retirement. The idea is that it has doubled numerous times by then. And then you can take out some every year to pay yourself a yearly salary after retirement, while the rest keeps gaining interest. it gets taxed when you take it out, as income. If I keep contributing at my current rate and retire at age 65, I should be able to get between $50-55k a year throughout my years after retirement. Assuming the American stock market doesn't totally collapse that is.
You also get social security payments after age 65, which are automatically paid as part of your taxes when you work. Of course they're gutting social security and it's questionable whether it will still exist when young people retire. Which is just outright theft since we've all been paying into it our whole lives.
Basically a lot of people of my generation are gonna be totally fucked and destitute when they are too old to work. Even now I see 80 year olds working at grocery stores and shit in order to survive. it's fucked.
Americans do pay much less taxes.
In return there are no pensions, expensive higher education and expensive health insurance though.
This exact subject has been done to death in this topic and forum in general. No system is perfect but it's crazy how the American people doesn't get shit while it's such a rich country.
Yeah and the craziest thing is that a lot of the people who consistently vote against using our tax dollars for stuff that benefits them like health care are the poorest and most in need of it. Reagan is considered one of the great American presidents but he was a fucking piece of shit, he started the idea of "trickle-down economics" where poor working class Americans somehow were fooled into believing that spending our tax dollars on the wealthy and privatizing public services would allow benevolent ultra-rich to use that money to help them. It was the start of the collapse of the middle class.
The idea of privatizing public services like hospitals/health care, schools and prisons is absolute nonsense and is a scourge on our society, yet so many people now scream "AHH OMG SOCIALISM" at the idea of changing it. It's madness.
Holy shit !
Yeah it's insanity. You can have an accident where you need to be hospitalized, or get cancer or something, and end up with $100k or more in debt to a hospital, and have to declare bankruptcy or be in debt your whole life. It's disgusting.
