Tax Expert’s Advice: Don’t Count on Social Security
BRENTWOOD, Tenn., July 1, 2011 — According to a poll taken earlier this year, 77 percent of voters think Social Security is in danger. Fewer Americans, however, approve of increasing the retirement age. Voters were split on permitting people to invest their Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts.
Tax expert Dr. Friday, aka “The Tax Doctor,” falls into the camp of doubters. “I don’t look to the government to be there for me; I don’t think anyone our age (30s-40s) should,” says Dr. Friday.
The good news, she says, is that “it’s never too late to start saving. The key is to find retirement plans with immediate tax benefits.” She recommends a disciplined savings plan, and her site, DrFriday.com, has an online guide to determine how much one should put away each month.
Dr. Friday outlines steps for retirement savings:
- Get out of debt so you can live on less than you make and actually save.
- Start saving once you have no high-interest credit cards/loans to pay off.
- Open a money market account and keep three to six months of living expenses in it for emergencies.
- Max out one or in some cases two of the following – IRA, Roth IRA, Simplified Employee Pension Plan (SEP), 401(k) or 403(b).
Dr. Friday’s advice is sound, considering proposals to cut Social Security benefits. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the lobby for older Americans, has been considered one of the leading opponents of cuts. However, the group recently indicated it was open to modest reductions in benefits for future recipients.
Darrell Payne, a public affairs specialist with the Social Security Administration, recently was interviewed by Dr. Friday and co-host Hank Parrott on the “Retirement Report” on Nashville’s Channel 5+. When asked about the solvency of Social Security, he said, “We’ll have enough money to last until 2037.”
“Social Security was designed after the Great Depression when people didn’t have any money,” says Dr. Friday. “It wasn’t designed to be your sole support for retirement.”
For more information on Social Security, visit https://www.ssa.gov. For more information on Dr. Friday’s financial services – including tax returns, retirement planning and business accounting – visit https://www.drfriday.com.
Dr. Friday’s advice is the same that I’m hearing from many investment advisor’s who are looking into the near future for young people to ensure that they’ve got something for retirement. Of course the optimum thing is to start your own business that makes you a ton of money so that you become financially self sufficient. That’s a lot harder to do, but starting your own business it what I recommend to every young person who has half a brain. American’s are a unique people who can start a business on their own. And do you know why? Do you know why only American’s seem to be able to start a business and make enough money to be able to live on it? It’s because, for one thing, we are free to come up with an idea and make a thing and then go out and try to sell it to people, because WE ARE FREE TO DO THAT!! Our Freedom is what causes an American to be able to come up with an idea that they could sell and make money off of it. We are FREE to even take something that belongs to us, put it on the internet and sell it and make money on it. American’s can do that, and other people in other countries might be able to do that as well, but then again they may have to pay heavy taxes on whatever they sell, so they don’t bother with it because they know the government is going to take most of what they get for the thing so they don’t even fool with trying to sell it. Unless they bootleg the thing on the black market.
American’s can invest what they make from working and save it up and after thirty or fourty years that investment will grow to be enough to live comfortably off of. That is if they are able to keep a job that pays enough to save. This economy is so volitile that you have no way of knowing what will happen month to month. Investment advisor’s look at it in a way that says nothing will happen to you, and you will be able to save “x” amount of money for “x” time and after that time you’ll have “x” amount of money to live off of. All those “x’s” don’t say crap about what happens if you don’t have the money a year from now to keep up with the amount that you and him agree if saved will end up being this amount to live off of.
I can remember when the jobs you could go to work for right after high school, work for thirty-five years or forty years and then retire from that company with a nice retirement check coming in and add that to your Social Security and you’d be set up. All these old people you see going down the highway in a Wennibego with the scooter on the back are the last people who got one of those jobs. They don’t exist anymore unless you go to work for a corporation in management, and at maybe a higher management level. You won’t ever be allowed to retire if you start out in the perverbial mail room and work your way up. That only happens in the movies, and old movies to, not any new movies. In new movies, they show upper management stealing the company blind by making risky investments in the stock market and then they leave the country when the Feds are after them for embezzelment. That’s the real America. People steal more from companies these days than ever before because they don’t know if they’ll have a job tomorrow.
I got laid off from a good job I had with the airlines and my supervisor ran in early in the morning just before I went up to the gate to launch airplanes, and he said they had a meeting with upper management yesterday and everyone is laid off. I got a fifteen minute notice that I had lost my job. Of course he did to when the company decided they didn’t want to be in the airlines business anymore and dumped the company and 635 employees in one day! Boy, that was a shock! The company was in Chapter 13 protection from creditors and were about to come out of it and the government changed the rules on us and all the other airlines like us. It wiped out alot of airlines. That was back at the end of the 80’s. So that proves you never know what is going to happen these days.