Gary Varvel for September 29, 2022

401k contributions are adjusted for inflation.

Mine is burning up fast.

Your 401K is an investment. You can look at it over the long term and see how it grows or you can see a dip and carp about what you “lost”. You have the choice, in almost any plan, to shift your balance out of the stock market or opt to pay the penalty and withdraw your funds.

You’re a genius! Who would have known that? How about me? I’m retired and don’t have the luxury of waiting for it to grow back. I’m not carping, I’m worried. Hope you don’t mind.

If you aren’t worried about your investments, what about your parents?

Are they retired? Are they living on a fixed income?

Or do you care about your parents?

It’s your day to day view that’s wrong. Look over the long term and you’ll see that the last year’s gains were an unrealistic bubble. We’re back on the normal track.

My parents’ generation put their retirement funds into T Bills and savings bonds and bank accounts. When Interest rates went so low, people were forced to invest in the stock market—funding huge raises for company administrators and having to deal with the ups and downs of the stock market. It hasn’t been a good system.

I’ve lived through a few democrats elected to the Presidency, I’ve experienced two results, a very real drop in my savings investment value and gun sales that go through the roof . America will learn; democrats are terrific gun salesmen and terrible for the economy. I’m thinking of investing in firearms manufactures and gun ammo manufactures. or not voting for democrats. Friends don’t let friends vote for democrats.

The DOW was 6,000 in 2008. S&P 500 was 900. Gary obviously doesn’t know these things. I think he is also unaware that you don’t win or lose till YOU CASH IN!! I put a lot into my S&P 500 fund when it hit 900 and I think it has gone up since then.

In a global free market this will happen. (Why is it that the biggest complaints come from those who claim to be free market advocates?) A pandemic, the response to said pandemic, Russian invasion of Ukraine, the inevitable departure from the work force by the Boomers along with the corresponding increase in wages for remaining workers, the price gouging by corporations all are factors in the decline in value of the 401ks. Or, was there expectation that everything would just continue to rise forever?

Again, Varvel shows that he ‘learned’ Economics’ from the ‘Grifter-in-Chief!’

It’s not forever. We cut back, ride it out and pick up later. And remember that unions negotiated pension plans and living wages, which were the enabler of retirement savings. Before that, most people expected to work until they couldn’t, and then live in abject poverty unless one of their children would take them in.

Have you heard about Sausalito, California?

They’re paying the Homeless there $18,000 a head to leave town.

Do you think they spent that in Taxpayer money, did they borrow that, or did they just print it?

^ From a ‘whistle in the wind?’

Thanks, Biden and the Demoncrats!

That is what happens with an idiot in charge. Over $7 trillion dollars of lost wealth thanks to Biden. The worst is yet to come.

My IRA has taken a beating too.

The economic illiteracy of the RWNJs is staggering! { But then they agree with Varvel…. }

Once upon a time, people got these things called pensions, where the employer promised them a sufficient income to live on in retirement. Pensions could be expensive for the companies, especially if the people in charge of managing investments that were supposed to pay for them were incompetent or dishonest. One day, a bright, young guy on Wall Street came up with the idea that instead of companies assuming the risk & responsibility of making sure people could retire, they could offload it all on the employees, while creating an opportunity for the Wall Street guy to make a whole lot more money.

That young man’s name was Ronald Reagan.

(Ok, really the guy who invented the 401k was Ted Benna who thought it would only be a thing for high income people & was not amused when conservative economists decided 401k programs for all workers would be a good tool to break the power of unions that negotiated defined benefit pensions.)

Yeah no kidding