Spain moves to raise retirement age to 67

John Leland writing in the NYT relays an excellent point form Teresa Ghilarducci about raising the Social Security retirement age: “People who need to retire early — and they need to — are folks that start working in their late teens, whereas people who are promoting raising the retirement age are people who were in graduate school or professional school and got into jobs that would logically take them into their late 60s and 70s,” she said.

Determining exactly what needs to be saved for retirement is tricky. Basically it is something that needs to be adjusted based on how things go (savings accumulated, saving rate, planned retirement date, investing returns, predicted investing returns, government policy, tax rates, etc.). The simple idea is start by saving 15% of salary by the time you are 30. Then adjust over time. If you start earlier maybe you can get by with 12%…

The Social Security trust fund is expected to be exhausted in 2033. After that, there will be enough tax revenue coming in to pay out about three quarters of promised benefits. However, a few changes to the system could prevent these steep benefit cuts.

The average monthly Social Security benefit for a retiree in 2013 is estimated at $1,261, according to the Social Security Administration

The most regressive way to cut Social Security is to raise the retirement age, but the strangest is the one Brian Beutler reports on, a House plan to cut the Social Security Administration’s administrative budget:

Larry Mishel writes in with another argument for why raising the Social Security age makes much more sense for affluent individuals who work in knowledge-oriented industries than for lower-income people whose jobs require more physical labor. If the argument is that life expectancy is rocketing upwards, and that retirement shouldn't grow along with it, it's important to point out that the increases in life expectancy aren't being shared equally: