Right now, too many women who reach retirement age find themselves widowed or single, relying on their Social Security check for over half of their income.
Whether you are just entering the workforce or nearing retirement age, planning for the future is critical.
It's time for a 21st-century retirement age. If 40 is the new 20 and 50 is the new 30, why shouldn't 70 be the new 65? The last time Washington politicians tinkered ever so gingerly with the government-sanctioned retirement age, Ronald Reagan was in office and Generation X-ers were all in diapers.
People who refuse to rest honorably on their laurels when they reach retirement age seem very admirable to me.
In order to fix Social Security, we must restructure it so that we continue to provide for our Nation's seniors that are approaching retirement age, but allow for younger taxpayers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in private accounts.
The full retirement age is 67 and the lifespan is 80, so when they first conceived Social Security, they didn't think they were going to be paying benefits for 13-15 years. That's one of the reasons why this pyramid scheme isn't working.
Well, we certainly need to raise the retirement age. I've told my 19-year-old and my 22-year-old that they're not going to be getting retirement benefits at age 62.
It is estimated that raising the retirement age to 70 would cut the shortfall by about 36%. But this proposal has some drawbacks. Women and men who have worked jobs that require manual labor all of their lives may not physically be able to do work until they are 70 years old.
The great thing about show business is that there's no mandatory retirement age.
You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career... So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised.