How to reform Social Security all by yourself
Why let Congress pick the winners and losers in your family?f
How will the country fix Social Security? The number of seniors, and their promised payments, are growing much faster than the number of wage earners and their payroll tax revenue.
The country needs to find sources of money to fill the gap.
Source 1: future wage earners will be taxed more to pay the government’s obligations to seniors, or
Source 2: future seniors will get less from Social Security.
These have variations and combinations, but the central fact is this: one generation or another of our family is going to get squeezed.
Congress will eventually decide. Will our parents and we get smaller Social Security checks? Or will our children and grandchildren get smaller paychecks?
But instead of letting the government decide who bears the sacrifice in our family, we can make that decision.
Source 3 is ourselves, today. Since one generation in our family is going to be squeezed, why not start squeezing ourselves a little now? A planned, voluntary lifestyle change. Cutting our spending and putting away some smart savings will create a growing pool of cash. Then our own family legislature can use those funds to offset the losses of whichever generation Congress decides to squeeze. If Social Security benefits are cut back, the savings supplement our retirement money. If the payroll tax is increased, the savings become annual tax-free gifts to our children or grandchildren.
It’s just one more reason to spend a little more carefully today. With a growing pool of ‘tomorrow’ money, instead of letting Congress pick the winners and losers in our family, we can make those allocations ourselves.
