From the Wall Street Journal. Select quotes, rearranged for maximum irony:
The average 401(k) balance was $131,700 at the end of 2024.
“What’s more important to me than having a few extra dollars in my retirement is that this country is set up for success,” Paris said.
The couple have lost $70,000 in retirement savings since January.
“He’s doing some hard work, some things that are very difficult for people to understand and difficult for people to accept,” Williams said, “but it’ll be to our long-term benefit.”
Meanwhile, the share of Americans who haven’t retired and are confident in their retirement prospects fell to 67% from 74% the prior year.
She said she takes solace in the fact that Trump is surrounded by a cabinet full of handpicked experts whose advice she thinks could help avoid further losses.
i think maybe the only thing that’s going to get through to voters like this is if they’re laughed at to their face
I hope these assholes starve.
So much cognitive dissonance for most of them, very very few of them will ever admit any mistake of theirs or his. They’ll just sort of tap dance around the failings
They’re in so deep that they’ll take any life buoy that their feed/infowars/fox news throws. Its like an automatic reaction they’re conditioned for.
The least shocking thing in this article is retirees in denial. Mental gymnastics is their full-time job; not like they’ve got anything else to do.
I honestly think the vast majority of them don’t think any mistakes have been made. They don’t know how fucking awful his cabinet is, etc.
She said she takes solace in the fact that Trump is surrounded by a cabinet full of handpicked experts whose advice she thinks could help avoid further losses.
… out of their fucking minds…
Was about to comment almost exactly this.
His “experts” are all cronies - and they’re not even slightly interested in the plight of the people, including the retirement prospects of 71 year old Mrs. Redlich.
Having any faith that Trump’s administratiom will do anything except line their wallets with tax payer money and do their upmost to fuck over Ukraine is morbidly stupid.
It’s worse than that. Most of his cabinet picks are not only not experts in their assigned fields, not even knowledgeable in them, but are actively antagonistic toward them. They wish to limit, downsize or outright destroy the departments under them, or else twist them so severely that they are essentially the polar opposite from their intended purpose. They sure as shit are not here to fix anything. They’re here to actively break things they hate.
You’re telling me that the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment isn’t the most qualified person to lead the Department of Education? ShockedPikachuFace
who was also in his first term, as the head of SBA.
To be fair. A lot of these people also have faith that because they said the right words to an imaginary being, they will be “saved” after they die.
Yes, they’re out of their fucking minds.
That last paragraph made me LOL. Surely that’s sarcasm?
I sold off all my stocks and etfs, but my 401k is still there and is STRUGGLING. It wasn’t much to begin with but damn it’s getting fucked both ways and back
Mine has wiped nearly 6 months of growth. And it’s fairly diversified.
They FAFO but never actually learn. That’s why elections are not about teaching people they were wrong.
So far into the Kool-aid she might as well just go to Jonestown
Respectfully, I feel I must disagree. I believe the beverage served in Jonestown was Flavor Aid, rather then Kool-aid.
Regarding your other point, yeah, she’s staunchly in favor of Coco Puffs.
These people are so delusional.
copium as well.
That’s a funny way to say stupid!
I know people like this. Some are intelligent, but the propaganda they consume warps their minds. They are engulfed in it and it is difficult to throw out all the sources they trust.
No, delusional is the right word. You can be mind numbingly stupid but still see cause and effect; food prices going up after his inauguration is a very basic and tactile thing.
Delusion is taking that lived experience and warping reality to fit your mental narrative.
And wealthy. That they could lose 70k and not feel anything, tells us that they’re wealthy.
Yes, they are.
To add some context to this headline, I estimate that 401k to be well into the seven figure range if it lost $70k since January. That’s just a guess based on the changes I’ve seen in my own account, though.
It just depends on the portfolio. Some stocks in mine have lost 25-30% for reasons entirely attributable to Trump.
Based solely on DJIA’s YTD loss of 2.35%
$70,000/0.0235≈$3,000,000
this is what a political cult looks like.
Any cult, really.
Probably shouldn’t focus on the short term stock movements.
If the Fed turns on the money printer, the stock prices will go up.
I would point to prices of housing and groceries, because that will not go down if the Fed turns on the money printer.
Its fine though, because Social Security is a ponzi scheme, pensions hurt the company’s bottom line, and everyone knows the stock market only goes up, so everyone should just have a 401k.
Spoken from bizzarro world / Republican voters for the last 40 years untill this very moment, apparently
I am pointing and laughing at anyone who voted for this and is now being hurt by it. I have zero sympathy. Absolutely none whatsoever. It’s a sociological Darwin Award, more or less.
I don’t know what their portfolio looks like but the closer you are to retirement, the more of your savings should be in bonds and not in the market.
Hopefully they start insulating themselves from the volatility of the market.
I’m certainly no trumper. Very liberal. I will just point out the things that I think about when seeing the headlines.
When Trump got elected, the stock shot up a lot. Where it is at now is a little less than what it was.
If it keeps dropping, or if we hit a recession, that is meaningful. Until then, it honestly doesn’t mean much. I have no doubt that the stock market will increase just as much under Trump as it did under Biden.
As for the 401k, those of us that are employed and not living off the proceeds, a drop is good as we will be able to buy more shares each pay period. By the time we retire, it will be significantly higher than it is now.
Does this mean Trump is good? No, but 401k balances of non retired people is a meaningless statistic.
If a recession comes, this would change things as employment will be lost and retired people will be affected more deeply. My heart will go out to the retired boomers who cause this in that case.
Edit: I’m glad to see the toxic redditors have made their way to Lemmy. Feels like home. Downvote anything that is not blind rage towards Trump.
No, but 401k balances of non retired people is a meaningless statistic.
No, its pretty important.
See, 401ks do this thing where they are invested in over time… they slowly accumulate from contributions and the index funds of the broad stock market appreciating over time.
… If you… are not yet retired… and your 401k takes a 10, 20, 30% haircut in a recession/depression…
(which are of course broadly predictable and should be expected every 5 to 10 years)
… well now, you not only have suffered that loss… you also reset the clock on how much your investments will appreciate over time.
Growth from interest is an exponential, not linear process.
This means you now have to massively increase your contributions to be able to afford the same retirement… or work longer, or, more realistically, never be able to truly retire.
… and that is assuming stock market growth reverts to the mean, inflation of primary retirement costs don’t spike, you don’t get laid off or have promotions and expected wage gains postponed in the recession, etc.
I have no doubt that the stock market will increase just as much under Trump as it did under Biden.
Then you are an idiot.
The housing market is crashing, right now, it’s begun, go look.
Something around 1/3 of existing homes are looking to be basically uninsurable in the next decade … insurance companies pay attention to climate change, and they hike rates or pull out of high risk areas.
Unfortunately… a whole lotof US homes are in high risk areas now. And you cannot get a mortgage if you can’t get home insurance.
Everyone’s credit scores are garbage, consumer credit is out of control, 60+% of Americans can’t afford to miss a paycheck, and Americans routinely pay consumer credit rates that are so high they are considered usury almost everywhere else in the developed world. Approximately a third or more of US households have zero to negative net worth, more debt than assets… and their day to day costs are going to go up, and their investment class assets (including homes) are headed downward.
Every major corporation is doing or has recently done massive layoffs.
We’re tariffing imported food, and our domestically produced food is reliant on migrant workers who all stopped working at farms because ICE is raiding them.
We are heavily reliant on imports and exports, and we’ve started a trade war and are threatening multiple new wars.
We are a highly international trade dependant economy … and we’ve decided to isolate and ostracize ourselves… we are a ‘rogue state’ now, using parlance from about a decade ago.
Getting a job is nigh impossible, 30+% of job listings are fake, ghost jobs, no one is hiring, everyone is underpaid other than C suite.
Finally, from a more technical perspective, the most solid predictor of recession/depressions is the inversion of government issued bond yields, ie, when short term lending is viewed as more risky (has a higher interest rate or yield) than long term lending.
Every single time the yield curve inverts, when it uninverts, a downturn rapidly follows.
Except now. Now, we’ve had the yield curve invert, uninvert, then invert again, and then uninvert again, without the massive downturn…
We are Wile Coyote who has ran off the edge of the cliff, and we just looked down.
We are looking at the second Great Depression.
Then you are an idiot.
Wow. Way to keep it civil… I suspect it’s people like you that are responsible for the gains republicans have gotten. Keep being an asshole to people and see how well that works for everybody.
As for what you’ve said, you clearly know nothing about how investments work. My 401k is invested in shares. Those shares will go up and down all the time. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. But on a long enough timeline they will average to a steady gain.
When shares dropped during covid, do you think that set my 401k back 2 years? No! It recovered the same as the stock market did, and then went up even more.
The only thing that changed was that when the stock market was down, I was able to buy MORE shares than I previously was buying. So when the stock market recovered, I had MORE than I would have if it didn’t drop.
Bro, this is BASIC, and you’re calling me an idiot.
Now as I said, if it turns into a recession and jobs are lost… that’s bad. But looking at 401k values of employed people is a meaningless statistic.
I am not civil with dangerous idiots.
Your 401k is almost certainly invested in a broad indexed market fund, ie, a weighted basket of stock shares, the composition of which basically doesn’t change over time.
In simpler terms… its a way of buying shares in the whole stock market, in its totality.
Unless you have a 401k with an active brokerage window, which you almost certainly don’t, all it is is an ETF that corresponds to whichever particular set basket of shares goes along with your particular 401k.
Again, unless you have issued specific instructions via a brokerage window to your 401k, which again, you almost certainly didn’t… nobody ‘sold high’ and ‘bought low’ to recoup losses or accelerate gains, there’s no active prediction of ‘oh this stock is gonna go down so we’ll sell it and pour that money into a stock that’s gonna go up’.
…
401ks are almost all not actively managed funds, they are almost all index funds. The whole point of a 401k being an indexed fund is that its safer and less risky than an actively traded fund, which is more volatile and can swing further up or down depending on how well those active traders do…
… and active stock traders are statistically as successful at generating stock trading gains as a goldfish randomly swimming to the left side of a tank to issue a sell order or the right side of a tank to issue a buy order.
That is to say, indistinguishable from completely random. They fuck up all the time, and they’re mire risky than some kind of focused, long term approach.
…
Only about 1% of trading volume in 401ks is done by ‘active trading’, 99% of that is just the 401k ETF slightly tweaking the composition of its basket of stocks to reflect (not predict or counteract) broad changes in the market, and 1% of that 1% is done by a very small number of 401k havers who issue specific commands to their financial firms to actually do such an active trade.
You would have to be the one to specifically issue a buy/sell order, and fairly few 401ks even allow people to do this.
401ks are just an index fund, and are not actively traded. You may personally have poured more money into your 401k at the dip, but that doesn’t mean you somehow … didn’t suffer the losses of the dip.
It means you compensated for your investment losses by throwing more of your savings or income at it than you expected to, so that you could tread water instead of sink.
…
The stock market did not have typical recession level losses from COVID, because every possible financial stop was pulled out to prevent that from happening… to keep the easy credit and other forms of investment and wealth flowing into the stock market, which now won’t work, because of all the reasons I listed above.
Technically, the stock market only dropped for 3 months, and because that occured between two quarters, and not fully within one, it doesn’t count as an actual recession, which is at least two solid quarters, 6 solid months of losses.
The last actual major recession we had in the stock market was the 07/08 housing market crash.
That was about a 30 to 35% haircut.
Took a year to get back to where you started.
That’s a year you missed out on accumulating the projected average interest on.
… And that also could only be done by massive intervention in the market, basically fixing up a popped housing bubble by re-blowing the housing bubble, and blowing up many, many other bubbles in the process…
…which are now set to all pop, as Trump is doing everything he can to undo the dollar’s reserve currency status, which is the only real reason our stocks are as high as they are, and why our economy even functions a shittily as it has for the last decade.
If this brewing recession turns into an actual depression, a prolonged period of years, decades of downward and uncertain stock market…
It took 25 years for the stock market to break a new high after the 1929, to fully recover.
25 years untill an investment you made at the peak, before the 1929 crash, would break even and be worth the same amount, in 1954.
You have no concept of how bad a depression like that is in comparison to a serious recession, and you apparently don’t even have a concept of what an actual recession looks like.
…
By the way, I have a degree in Econ, worked as a data analyst for a decade, ‘bro’.
You are in fact an idiot, maybe learn a bit how financial investments actually work before confidently being wrong, bro.
As I said, buddy, a recession would be bad. Everything you’re saying I agree with and agreed with in my original post. Quit being a dick to people.
And I wasn’t talking about the funds actively buying when the price is low or selling when the price is high. I am employed and twice a month I make deposits to my 401k. If the market is high, I get less shares. If the market is low, I get more shares. More shares is better so long as the market recovers.
If the market does not recover, or we hit a recession. That would be bad.
By the way, I have a degree in Econ, worked as a data analyst for a decade, ‘bro’.
So when you say, “If you think that then you’re an idiot”, you weren’t just being a dick, you were being a smug pretentious dick.
If only I had your education and experience, I wouldn’t be an idiot. Everybody else, though? Dangerous idiots who should be treated with zero respect.
Everything you said could have been said in a much more respectful manner and probably would have made an impact on people that actually need to hear it. Instead you were a dick about it and the only people that are going to listen are already in agreement.
Everything you’re saying I agree with and agreed with in my original post.
That is blatantly, obviously false.
You said you expected stocks to go up generally under Trump, as they did under Biden.
That was the point where I went from explaining to you how 401ks actually work, without insulting you, to outright calling you an idiot.
You absolutely do not agree with everything I have said.
…
Quit being a dick to people.
As I said before, I do not engage politely with people who are confidently wrong, and then double down on being wrong after being corrected.
You are the kind of idiot who spreads misinformation and thus exposes other people to danger by giving them false notions about how things actually work.
You… seem to think I am trying to convince you, personally, that you are wrong.
I am not.
I don’t give a damn about trying to change the minds of people who are confidently wrong.
I am dispelling the idiotic misinformation you are spreading on a public forum, that other people may read, in hopes of doing a general public good by laying out and explaining, in detail, why no one should take you seriously on this topic, such that less narcissistic and more curious readers may have a chance at learning something.
As I said before, I do not engage politely with people who are confidently wrong, and then double down on being wrong after being corrected.
You were a dick in your first post, dude. You didn’t “explain politely then I doubled down”. You were a dick from the jump.
My initial post was absolutely not a “confidently incorrect” comment. I am a dude that did not graduate with an economics degree with years of (non social) experience. I told you my interpretation and said what I thought was going to happen and what was happening.
I’m sorry that you felt like my expectations were wrong, but rather than call me an idiot and act like I am spreading lies, you can have a good faith conversation with a person you don’t even know.
I am dispelling the idiotic misinformation you are spreading on a public forum, that other people may read, in hopes of doing a general public good
Pro tip, don’t be a dick if this is what you hope for. Not everybody you talk to is a hidden maga operative spreading lies.
Things will get better eventually, as long as you live long enough to see that.
I’m old, may not live thru another pandemic, I just want to be happy today and tomorrow.
If I were close to retirement age, or retired, or worked in a job where my employment wasn’t guaranteed, I would definitely be worried about
Why would you think stocks will go back up? The tariffs have proven that we are an unreliable trading partner, and countries are starting to look elsewhere. In addition, the outrage from abandoning our allies has caused a large part of the world to boycott our companies. I don’t see how things could possibly go back to what they were.
The stock market has never not recovered. Even the 2008 recession is just a blip when looking at the max timeline.
Unless you’re implying the end of the stock market, then yes, the stock market will of course go back up.
I’m not saying that the stock market will end. I’m saying that we will never be in as good of a position ever again. The post ww2 world order is being rewriten right now. We were at the top because we were more or less trustworthy and had significant influence throughout the world. We didn’t have much competition. Now that no one trusts us and our influence is being dismantled our trading partners will seek out our competitors or start their own industry creating even more competition. I hope I’m wrong, but i just don’t see how we will ever be trusted again.
This might be true, but it is speculation. Trump could easily reverse course and other countries might just go back to status quo cause it’s easier.
I very much feel like there’s too many possibilities to speculate at this point.
Yup. Just going by the indexes, the stock market is down all the way to last summer. It’s been a precipitous and steady drop, but if you’re a true believer, it would be easy to say it’s just giving up a little bit of Trump bubble, hope it’s almost over, and relax. After all, they’ve still got their job or most of the stock market gains collected over the last 20 years, so their immediate personal conditions look great.
Apparently, one of the things that becomes really difficult as IQ drops even a little bit below 100 is hypothetical-conditionals. Like, “How would you feel if you hadn’t eaten breakfast?” becomes, “But I did eat breakfast, and I feel fine.” So, looking at the economic disruption Trump’s causing, imagining that it could continue or get worse, and what that might mean for their personal situation can be a real, does-not-compute struggle.
If the disrupt does continue, it will be bad. I feel like this is just a rerun of 2017 so far, though. He made some “deals” that returned everything to the exact place it was before he started and claimed victory, then the stock market kept on as it was.
You still think no recession is an option?
Until we’re in a recession, yes, I think that’s an option. I’m far from an economist, though, so I really don’t k so.
