- When a death wish is preferable to retirement…
- Holiday retail scare: Why low gas prices won’t be enough
- World’s biggest oil consumer saves big… Where will the money go?
- Dethroning the dollar: Chuck Butler runs down a China checklist
- The most business-friendly states… Putin, that sly dog… When a single-payer advocate makes sense… And more!
How stressful is the thought of retirement? Is it enough to wish an early grave if the alternative is penury in your golden years?
The Harris pollsters conducted a survey late this summer, probing middle-class Americans about their retirement anxiety. The most eye-opening takeaway was that 22% of respondents said they’d rather “die early” than not have enough to live comfortably in retirement.
True, “comfort” is in the eye of the beholder. So is “survival”… and 48% of respondents in their 50s said they won’t have enough to “survive” on in retirement.
[Worth pointing out: The poll was commissioned by Wells Fargo. Which, of course, had only the purest of motives. After all, they wouldn’t dream of luring people to hand over their retirement nest eggs, however modest, to Wells Fargo — the better to rake off exorbitant fees via “packaged products” cooked up by their marketing people. Perish the thought!]
The pollsters had an expansive definition of the middle class: Respondents age 30-75 had household income of $50-100,000 and investable assets of less than $100,000.
Which makes these additional findings from the poll cause for concern…
- 19% of “middle-class” Americans have no retirement savings at all
- 34% are not currently saving for retirement, and that number rises to 41% for people in their 50s
- Median savings among everyone surveyed, ages 25-75, was a mere $20,000.
No wonder people are concerned about “comfort” or even “survival.”
If you identify with this level of anxiety, we can save you a bit of your 5 Mins. and tell you to skip down to the next “timestamp” at 1:10. You’re not ready for what we’re putting on the table today.
If you’re still with us, you might still feel anxiety — especially if your idea of “comfort” in retirement is not having to worry about a budget for travel or concerts or meals out. Pretty comfortable, wouldn’t you agree?
In the summer of last year, we conducted an informal survey of our own readership, asking “What’s your number” if that’s the kind of retirement you’d like to aim for. We got nearly 3,000 replies. Average of the bunch: $4.512 million.
With those responses in mind, we launched an experiment — signing up 917 bold individuals eager for an aggressive but achievable path to that dream retirement. They were able to generate gains of 40% in a single day… and saw a winner that doubled their money.
We’re ready to launch the next phase of this project… and you’re invited to take part.
But as we’ve indicated, it’s not for everyone. So we’re keeping a strict cap on the number of people who can take part.
Only you can decide whether this strategy is right for you. We encourage you to explore the possibilities: If you’ve been dreaming big, here’s where to start making those dreams reality.
Major U.S. stock indexes are recovering the ground they lost yesterday.
As we write, the Dow and the S&P are back in record territory. It helps that for once, Wal-Mart delivered an earnings report that met analysts’ expectations.
But are retailers about to get some of that proverbial coal in their stockings for the holidays?
That’s the takeaway we get from a surprisingly glum Reuters article this week. Yes, gasoline below $3 a gallon effectively puts $2 billion “extra” in consumers’ pockets every month.
But, the newswire suggests, “higher food costs are eating into or eclipsing savings from gasoline, and a $2 billion jump in spending could be a much smaller bump after food inflation is taken into account.”
The consultancy Customer Growth Partners suggests higher food prices will vacuum $10 billion out of consumer wallets during November and December compared with a year ago. But the savings from lower gas prices works out to only $5 billion.
Or as a shopper at a Kmart in the Chicago suburbs tells Reuters, “Everything is so expensive and my husband’s salary has not increased.”
Today’s the day crude might hit $75. As we write, it’s down 2.5%, to $75.26. That’s West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark.
Overnight, OPEC issued a forecast that demand for its product would drop next year. News of lower-than-expected inventories in the U.S. haven’t been enough to stanch the bleeding: “Prices stayed lower,” says The Wall Street Journal, “on expectations that oil producers wouldn’t curtail production despite a precipitous drop in prices in recent months.”
Brent crude, the global benchmark, has tumbled below $80, to $79.28.
The world’s biggest energy petroleum consumer is on track for 20% budget savings if oil prices stay in the $80 range “for an extended period of time,” says our Byron King.
That consumer is the U.S. Department of Defense. With that savings, “it’ll be possible,” says Byron, “for the new Congress to reprogram some funds to other defense needs… and my hunch is that we’ll see more procurement for ships, aircraft, electronics and ordnance.”
As we noted last week, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee will be John McCain. “He’s definitely more of a ‘hawk’ than many others,” says Byron, “and I suspect will tend to push for more robust, decisive military responses to any number of current security issues that confront the U.S. — think about Russia, China, Middle East and more.
“The implication of Sen. McCain in that position is that the services will pick up more tasking, and then come back to Capitol Hill asking for more money to buy more equipment and stand up more personnel to use it.”
Byron will continue to follow the money for subscribers of his Military-Tech Alert.
“This is huge news,” says our friend Chuck Butler at EverBank World Markets — as we follow up our item yesterday on how the Shanghai Stock Exchange will be open to foreign retail investors starting Monday.
“To me,” says Chuck, “this is simply another step in China’s march toward removal of the dollar reserve system.
“Remember when I told you that China needed to open up their capital markets to the outside world before they could lay claim on the reserve currency? This is just one of the requirements that will be needed to achieve their goal, but let’s take a look at the score card:
1. They needed to gain a wider distribution of their currency. Done!
2. They need to have a free-floating currency. Working toward that
3. They needed to have very deep pockets. Done!
4. The need to open up their capital markets to the outside world. ETA on completion: 4 days!
“Oh, it might still take a few more years. But with China stepping up the pace,” Chuck concludes, “it certainly looks to me that 2017 could be the year that we here in the U.S. find out that debt really does matter.”
Looking for a business-friendly state? Go West — whether you’re young or old, man or woman.
“Eight of the top 10 states in Forbes’ annual study of the Best States for Business are west of the Mississippi,” writes Forbes’ Kurt Badenhausen.
Tops is Utah, which also led the list from 2010-12. “Utah has a very pro-business climate,” says Badenhausen, “and companies benefit from energy costs that are 26% below the national average — third lowest in the nation. Utah’s economy expanded 2.4% a year over the past five years — fifth best in the U.S. It is the only state to rank in the top 10 in five of the six main categories we used to determine the Best States.”
Last year’s winner, Virginia, fell to No. 4, thanks to a softer economic forecast “hindered in part by the budget sequestration of 2013 and reductions in government spending.”
Yeah, you and I might consider that a good thing, but there you go. Which is the reason we take all of these surveys with a shakerful of salt. But it’s good fun nonetheless…
“I think you have misunderstood the significance of the positioning of world leaders during the APEC summit photo op,” a reader writes after our take yesterday.
“The fact that Vladimir Putin is standing beside Xi Jinping has nothing to do with China getting closer to Russia. Rather, it is just Xi Jinping putting himself between Vlad the smoothie and the first lady after that embarrassing blanket incident. He is not at all worried about Barack putting the moves on his missus.”
The 5: Oh, you had to bring that up.
We make a point of watching as little of the U.S.-based 24-hour news channels as possible. But even Al Jazeera English — as opposed to the unwatchable U.S. version — indulged in this bit of piffle.
Putin on the charm…Turns out it was quite the sensation on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. But after it was shown live on state TV, the footage hasn’t aired there since…
“Perhaps more importantly,” writes a reader from Malaysia, trying to get us back on a serious track, “Putin is placed not only next to Xi, but on his right side — a most important position in China.”
The 5: Good point.
“More of that ‘most transparent administration in history,'” writes one of our regulars about Jonathan Gruber, the Obamacare architect who attributed the bill’s passage to “the stupidity of the American voter or whatever.”
“Incidentally,” our reader continues, “Herr Doktor Gruber was paid $400,000 by Obama admin, and visited White House a dozen times while Obunglercare was being developed. Y’know… that health care plan that couldn’t get a website completed that even a ‘stupid’ junior high student might have done in a week, but cost, per Bloomberg, over TWO billion dollars.
“Now yet another video has emerged from a previous event which illustrates how the MIT professor’s characterization of Americans as ‘stupid’ was a common theme during his public appearances.
“No word yet from the Obama admin on Gruber’s own stupidity here — or relative to the whole website fiasco — as they refused comment and are still frantically trying to find a way to either spin this or hoping people forget about it in a week.”
The 5: We see Gruber is lamely trying to take it all back. “The comments in the video were made at an academic conference. I was speaking off the cuff,” he told MSNBC. “And I basically spoke inappropriately, and I regret having made those comments.”
Uh-huh. “The problem is not that he said it. The problem is that he thinks it,” says former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. “I’m serious. The core problem under the damn law is that it was put together by a bunch of elitists who don’t really fundamentally understand the American people. That’s what the problem is.”
Gov. Dean, as you might recall, is a “single payer” guy. But on this score, we’re reasonably sure his fellow MD Ron Paul would agree.
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast