Quote:
Originally Posted by IllTestYourGirls
If you invested the money you put into SS the interest alone would be more than the SS payments you receive, and if you die early, you still get to give that money to your family, unlike SS. So yes to all those who paid into SS and died you screwed their family big time.  |
The average wage in the US is $16 an hour. So that is 32K a year. So if you started when you were 25 and you put 8% in every year without fail and got 3% interest (I picked that number because you would want something stable. The stock market could spike then collapse and it could screw you over. So if you took 3% that would give you around 202K at age 65. 3% interest gives you around 6K a year off of that so just to get what you would draw off of SS you would need to draw an additional 9K a year out of that on top of the interest you get.
So, in theory it would last you a long time. But this is also taking into consideration that you still have medicare/medicaid for health coverage. If you would have to supply that yourself, then how long your savings would last would depend on your health. If, at that age, you are still in good health it could still last you a while. If you need a lot of medicine or run into a health problem you could drain that pretty quickly.
Of course there are a lot of things to take into consideration like raises, education and the interest rate you could get. I'm just making this as an example that it could work, but it would still require people to have everything go perfectly and they would still need medicare/medicaid