Boomers Not Ready For Retirement

The ledger (Lakeland, Florida) ^ | Monday, November 27, 2006 | MARINA BLOMBERG

[Gaffer]

There is a limit to how much you can earn before taxes become a hassle with SS, though. I don't know you or your situation. There is also a $10,000 limit that you can be "gifted" before taxes are owed

I think it's up to $11K now.....

[brownsfan]

"I'll be happy to sell you my house in Jersey when I escape to PA."

Oh yeah, I want to go from purple Ohio to blue Jersey? No, no thanks. Ohio is symptomatic of the nation as a whole. The escape I had in mind would be more like Montana, or even perhaps out of the US.

[Kenton]

We have a growing shortage of workers (allegedly the reason we need to keep importing people from the third world) while we have a growing number of retiring boomers, the vast majority of whom are physically able to work and, what's more, would benefit themselves AND society by continuing to do so.

There's another side of this that most people don't realize.

Businesses are well aware that the Boomers will soon be retiring, and taking their work ethic and pre-1960s public education literacy with them. The people due to replace them are not as motivated or as educated as the boomers. Many current college applicants are functional illiterates.

Companies are already exploring incentives to get the boomers to stay past their normal retirement age. I know my company is. (I'm getting this from HR professionals, BTW.)

The Gen-X/Gen-Y wannabe rock stars will eventually want to get good jobs. What if the boomers just hang in there and don't open up the good positions? You think we're hearing complaints now, just wait. "Jeez, Gramps, here I been worrying about having to support your Social Security payments, but instead I still have to borrow money from you like when I was a kid, cuz you still got MY dream job."

[Gandalf_The_Gray]

?? It took the DOW twenty-five (25) years just to break even after the '29 crash. I'm sure we agree on far more than we disagree, but not too sure about the "any ten year period" thing..

I did not do the research myself. I am guilty of repeating as fact something I read in a book on "technical investing". The flaw may be that we are looking at two different things. I reported gains averaged over a ten year period reported as a percentage and you are looking at gaining back everything that was lost in absolute terms. I think if you look at a running average over ten years the crash of October 1929 would fall entirely out of the calculation by October 1939. Even during the ten years of it being factored in it's just one data point among 520 if you are basing the average on weekly data.

As some here (FR) have said, I started out keeping Excel spreadsheets of my investments. In addition to the raw data, I plot a ten day and thirty day running average. With a running average being the sum of the past "N" days divided by "N". Tomorrow you do it again, dropping the oldest point and adding in the latest point. By doing it with "N"=10 and "N"=30 two things become apparent: The averaged data is "smoothed" (daily fluctuations are reduced) and the overall shape of the curve is the same as the raw data but delayed by the averaging period. In that sense the averaging process acts like a "low pass" filter, it smooths out the high frequency noise and introduces a lagging phase-shift. As you might guess the thirty day curve is smoother then the ten day curve.

The essence of "technical trading" can be reduced to watching the curves. If the raw data is leading the ten day curve, buy. If it drops below the ten day average, stop buying and hold. If it falls below the thirty day average, consider moving out of equities.

I have never looked at a ten year average but I'll bet it's darn near a straight line sloped up at about 10%

Regards,
GtG