Lately every so-called analyst has started to talk a lot about the pending financial crisis in the retirement of the Baby Boomers. And the projections for the future look the same in all these “studies”: when this generation will begin to retire in mass, around the year of 2011, the pension system (Social Security) will collapse.
There are some differences in the details, of course. Some people predict that the retirement benefits themselves will empty the coffers of the social security system in your country (no matter what they call it); others tell us that the Medicaid will deplete the system and so on. There are also differences when it comes about the year when the state-run pension systems will become insolvent (or bankrupt). Depending on who you are listening to, you will learn that the “doomsday” comes in 2017, 2024, 2032 etc.
The only thing they all agree upon – a pension crunch is coming…
However, if you are willing to dig a little bit deeper into the issue, you can easily discover that the concerns about the pension system and the looming retirement crunch for Baby Boomers has almost nothing to do with the present financial-economic crisis that started in 2008.
Many researchers were warning us starting from the late nineties and in the first years of this 21st century – way earlier than we saw any crisis on the horizon. Very respectable researchers told us that the Baby Boomers don’t have enough savings for the retirement they dream about. Other researchers analysed the demographic trends and came to the conclusion there will not be enough money to pay the retirement benefits for all the Baby Boomers.
Unfortunately, nobody wanted to hear those news because we lived in a dream world. It is a well-known and established fact that we, the Baby Boomers, hate to face the reality of simple natural processes like aging and dying. We have never been ready to tackle those issues and postponed all the important decisions until it was too late. We are now in that “too late” stage.
