Posted on 09/18/2013 5:30:22 AM PDT by Kaslin
It does sound like a reason... and yeah, the end could be closer than we think... Thanks for sharing.
>>When she retired her pension checks were SIGNIFICANTLY larger then her pay had been when working.<<
Taking inflation into consideration, that is the way retirement should be planned for.
Nonsense. No private firm would pay a pension greater then the salary the person was earning while actually working. I’m not saying the payments increased with inflation, I’m saying the week after she retired she noticed a significant increase. That’s just crazy.
I retired 18 years ago. My income now, from my pension plan and the private retirement investments I made before I retired are paying me twice what I normally received as a paycheck during the last five years I was working. I planned it that way. It wasn’t an approved plan, it was self designed for the future that I saw beyond the horizon thirty years ago.
Am I lucky? Darn right I am because I saw beyond the then failing SSI checks that most people attempt to survive on. I scrimped and saved while I was working so that I hopefully wouldn’t have to during my retirement years and it worked.
Here’s the blunt truth. Out of the top twenty cities in America....all are in some sort of financial ailment. I would probably say that fifteen are ten years away from being a Detroit, and the remaining five are probably twenty years away.
Personally, I don’t see how you avoid this unless you stop the pension and healthcare cost spiral by city management folks.
I would also recommend that all folks sit down and read the Detroit Free Press examination of how Detroit came to this end-point...posted about a week ago on their site. There were signs in the 1980s...when property values started to slide and folks were leaving town (for the burb’s). If they had reacted then....they would have pushed the bankruptcy back another decade or two. If you see that your town’s population has peaked, property values are slipping for a 2nd consecutive year....you need to trim city cost and prepare for a dry-spell.
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