Ah, the power of IRONY. Big time 401K disciple's 401K collapsed, can't retire.

[LJ_Reloaded]

Libertarians! This is the world you want, and what it will come to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/o...based-retirement.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=general

OP-ED COLUMNIST
My Faith-Based Retirement
By JOE NOCERA
Published: April 27, 2012

My 60th birthday is less than a week and a half away, and if there is one thing I can say with certainty it’s that 60 is not the new 50.

My body creaks and groans. My eyes aren’t what they used to be. I don’t sleep as soundly as I did just a few years ago. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of doctors, just to make sure everything still more or less works.

I’ve also found myself with a sudden urge to get my house in order — just, you know, in case. Insurance, wills, that sort of thing. Sixty is when you stop pretending you’re going to live forever. You’re officially old. Or at least old-ish.

The only thing I haven’t dealt with on my to-do checklist is retirement planning. The reason is simple: I’m not planning to retire. More accurately, I can’t retire. My 401(k) plan, which was supposed to take care of my retirement, is in tatters.

Like millions of other aging baby boomers, I first began putting money into a tax-deferred retirement account a few years after they were legislated into existence in the late 1970s. The great bull market, which began in 1982, was just gearing up. As a young journalist, I couldn’t afford to invest a lot of money, but my account grew as the market rose, and the bull market gave me an inflated sense of my investing skills.

I became such an enthusiast of the new investing culture that I wrote my first book, in the mid-1990s, about what I called “the democratization of money.” It was only right, I argued, that the little guy have the same access to the markets as the wealthy. In the book, I didn’t make much of the decline of pensions. After all, we were in the middle of the tech bubble by then. What fun!

 

[hummermania]

So what?
What do you care?
You will just leech your socialist support from the failed system anyway.

 

[MNGuy]

So, he loses half of it in the tech bubble burst of 2000. Poorly diversified. I didn't lose a dime, my investments still went up in value.

Then loses half in a divorce.

Then since he has not much left, decides to use it to renovate a house.

Poor decisions on his part.