Only a fool would depend 100% on Social Security for retirement.
Start early, and start young. Get a job that offers a retirement plan - even fast food chains do this now. Get the maximum match possible - it snowballs so much faster than people think.
Don't count on the government to provide for you. That is a serious tactical error.
Plan as-if Social Security will not be there. Then, if you get anything at all, it's just gravy.
I don't have a snowball's chance of landing a job with retirement plans. I'm currently part-time and it's the best job I've ever had. The last time I had a job with a retirement plan was 1999, and I lasted 4 months.
Several years ago, I started looking toward my future and wondering how I was going to manage it. I looked into how Social Security works, and I discovered to my horror that I hadn't worked enough to draw Social Security on retirement. This was a big consideration because of my finances and my disability.
So I realized that what was going to happen is that I would work diligently at whatever job I could get, as many hours as I could muster, for as long as it took to earn those sweet Social Security credits, and then see what happens.
I made it to my goal, so my Social Security benefits are now "assured" as much as anything can be. This is the last job I'll ever have. Once I'm no longer able to do this job, I'll apply for SSDI, and then look forward to Social Security in retirement. As for health insurance, I'll have Medicaid, and perhaps I'll die before I'm 65. Good times.
I didn’t explicitly do this but I started to take some cues from the FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early) crowd, in particular the FI part. If, by the time I’m 50 (call it 20 years from now), I don’t have to work in order to pay the bills: success. At that point, I always love my job (barring the occasional rocky period) or I bounce, no second thoughts.
To that end, most of my disposable income (admittedly, as a relatively high earner) goes first to max out the employer contributions to my 401(k) (might as well be extra salary), then to max out my yearly contributions to my HSA, then to an ITA at a hedge fund. (My income recently passed a threshold which lowered my maximum yearly contributions to a Roth IRA so I stopped regular contributions to that in order to avoid the need to keep track of what my limit actually is. This isn’t recommended; I’m just lazy.)
> it snowballs so much faster than people think
Indeed, I seem to be well on my intended track and I didn’t start doing this in earnest until ~5 years ago. As it’s been said: best yesterday, second best today.
> My income recently passed a threshold which lowered my maximum yearly contributions to a Roth IRA so I stopped regular contributions to that in order to avoid the need to keep track of what my limit actually is.
Look into a backdoor Roth IRA - you may still be eligible to contribute the full amount.
> Only a fool would depend 100% on Social Security for retirement.
This has plenty of "let them eat cake" vibes. There's plenty of folks struggling just to make ends meet without the luxury of putting much away for retirement. Like a poor old lady I saw working in a CVS in Cambridge recently, hooked up to an Oxygen bottle (probably due to COPD) and still working stacking shelves.
there was a financial advisor at Apple who gave talks to employees and iirc they did mention that they used a rough percentage for advising clients with for what to expect from Social Security. It may have been 2/3 or 3/4 or 70%. I don't think it was as high as 80.
