[quote=bearishgurl]Flyer, it doesn’t seem like you’re taking into account defined benefit pensions paid monthly to boomer-and-beyond households. The vast majority of the over-55 cohort that I’m acquainted with have at least one DB pension coming into the household. And about 3/4 of those households ALSO paid into Social Security (whether or not they are currently collecting any). With one or more DB pensions combined with SS paid to one or more persons of a household, certainly this is enough money for a 1-2 person household to live relatively comfortably and indefinitely …. especially if their primary residence is paid off.
I realize that most boomers came from families with 3-6 kids and that any inheritance from the last parent who died would likely be split up among the heirs which would account for smaller inheritances in a large portion of families (don’t know the percentage). This is assuming the last remaining parent didn’t use a lot of long term care or avail themselves of LT care on Medi-Cal in their final years (which would cause a MC lien to be placed on any real property they owned).
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Perfect example of why anecdotes are not the same as data. For the last 35 years, fewer than 30% of workers were covered by DB plans. Even among those with some kind of plan, fewer than half had DB plans, and those numbers are much lower today than they were 35 years ago. Today, that number is less than 10%.
There is no period of time over the last 60 years when average families had 3-6 kids. And we have to go back 100 years since more families had more than 2 or more children than fewer than 2.
The people that surround you are not representative of the rest of the population.
