What's in Your Portfolio

[IamSam]

I think younger workers are certainly going to have a more difficult time figuring out how to live in retirement than workers in my generation and our parent's generation had. Retired workers who are now in their 70's and above probably had it easier than many. They had the advantage of working and saving in those prosperous American decades right after the end of WWII.

It seems to me that retirement planning was worth doing up to around the time of Reagan. Every since the financial Bonzo tricks that were introduced back then, it's become ever more difficult to figure out sane financial plans for a life of full retirement at age 65.

As a boomer who entered the work force full time after I got my degree in 1980, I joined the rest of my generation with the country and the economy already under-going a retreat from the halcyon post war era.

These days we get to wonder if and how much of what the government promised us from all those nose to the wheel payroll taxes will ever actually materialize. The large boomer generation paid out a considerable sum in social security taxes that allowed the pols to play fast and loose with money that belonged to all of us taxpayers - NOT the rapacious members of Congress with their pet wars and pet military bases in the old home district and pet tax subsidies to their pet special interest groups.

We have been lied to by the government at every turn. No surprise there, but the lies have become more and more egregious, so that people in their early sixties and younger must worry that Medicare will be seriously tampered with - maybe even vanish. We have no idea what will become of Social Security, either. Halliburton may decide that baby needs a new pair of shoes and those of us who are in the unenviable position of depending on Social Security may end up living in chicken coops again. Worst of all, we might have to move in with one of our kids - probably the one who happens to have a fold down ironing board hanging over the kitchen door - almost as good as a Murphy bed!

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by IamSam

Halliburton may decide that baby needs a new pair of shoes

Halliburton sold off its war services division in 2007 and is now just an oil services company. They are a generator of wealth now.

[IamSam]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Halliburton sold off its war services division in 2007 and is now just an oil services company. They are a generator of wealth now.

We certainly have had our differences, but I have to admit that you have the best sense of humor evah! Yeah, old Halli is generating dollars faster than the Treasury can print them out. You never saw a happier group of CEO's and major shareholders in your life - especially when you scan down the list of Halliburton's affiliate corporations.

Much of the gang these days is going into the fracking game full speed ahead. The fav techniques out West here is to construct endless roads back and forth across public lands for thousands of miles (that means the lands that belong to ME, Sam; and YOU, Undertoad, BTW). Once Halliburton and the rest of 'em has pumped ever last molecule of natural gas out from between the layers of shale, and caused the Colorado and Green Rivers (among others) to go dry since fracking requires mucho aqua, the energy guys will pack into their crew cab, hit the liquor store drive thru for some Coors and Glenlivit and are never seen in those parts again.

Whatever rural region in the West that has just been raped in this manner faces an expensive massive clean-up which will never really end. The dry soil around here has a tendency to turn into dust and blow away if you scrape it off the land's surface to put in an unpaved road. And there's that nagging little water problem. Have the aquifers now become depleted or contaminated with fracking chemicals? Can the rancher across the way get his water rights back?

Who knows? But the taxpayers are either going to have to fork out a bunch of cash in an attempt to mitigate the huge environmental damage that we all now get to deal with. Or, we could do what the now defunct US Uranium Mining Corporation did to the poor little Colorado mining town of Uravan, since the Corporation CEO's couldn't have cared less about either safety or the environment. It was much easier to just send the bull dozers in to flatten every building in sight and then pave the entire thing over with asphalt. They even made a deal with the CO Department of Highways to re-route Colorado 145, so that it no longer goes by what has become a huge and distasteful grave by the side of the old road.

The Uranium Company then declared bankruptcy which meant it never had to pay a penny for clean-up, and its various affiliates were gobbled up by affiliates from other energy and hard rock mining outfits and - POOF!

Yep, creates so much money that those offshore banks may have to start digging under the ocean to store it all.

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Me? I'd stick with gold if I could. Since gold is out of the question, given my slender resources, my portfolio consists of items that would fill a whacko survivalist type with joy - Coleman lanterns, tents, non perishable food items, maps, The Army Manual for Escape and Evasion, etc. Hey! At least collecting all this stuff keeps me off the streets.

[sexobon]

Originally Posted by IamSam

... Me? I'd stick with gold if I could. ...

A wise investment is in guns. You can realize substantial profit from them ... one way or another.

[tw]

Originally Posted by IamSam

We have been lied to by the government at every turn.

Government did not create mutual fund scams. However corrupt political rhetoric tried to move Social Security into mutual funds. Others were so easily manipulated as to advocate that near disaster (along with another myth about tax cuts making a more prosperous economy). Who proposed those myths? People who would later be called the Tea Party.

We discussed poor investments in 2004. Government was nowhere in that discussion. Professional financial people (ie stock brokers, mutual fund managers) - not government - were specifically cited as the problem. Frontline in The Retirement Gamble has simply confirmed what was posted eight years earlier.