Broke baby boomers

Most folks my age don't have pensions anymore. My work in healthcare had a VERY modest pension that stopped years ago, and I finally just accepted a buy out rather than the pittance per month I would have gotten at retirement age. My last two positions have carried no pension benefits and the match for my IRA is 4%. We are starting to look at retirement, and finding that our current forecast of SS payments will add up to not quite half of our current income.

And that half of our income is before Paul Ryan gets a hold of SS. If he and his fellow Republicans manage to gut SS like they want, there will be old folks all over having to be supported by their kids, if they're lucky, or eating cat food if they're unlucky.

When I started my career, everyone had a pension to count on as well as SS, if you worked for a decent sized company. It got pulled out from under a good number of folks. It's easy to blame people for not saving more now, but lots of folks got blindsided by the very rapid migration away from pensions.

We are lucky, compared to averages, but it's still a source of worry and stress for us. I can't imagine how stressful it is for those less fortunate than us.