Global Pension Crisis: Unfunded Liabilities and How We Can Fill the Gap

Foreword

Rich Marin's Global Pension Crisis is a lively, entertaining, yet terrifying book. Before you read very far into it, you'll realize that looming Boomer retirements are a ticking time bomb that threatens even those who have saved prudently for most of their lives. That's because many millions of others will enter retirement with virtually no private savings. The second group, which is far larger than the first, will face unmet needs that governments will find politically impossible to ignore. And to meet those needs, we'll need lots of additional tax revenue, which can only come from those in a position to provide it. As Willie Sutton replied when asked why he robbed banks, “that's where the money is.”

So no matter whether you have planned carefully for your retirement or you haven't, there's some tough sledding ahead. For most of us, private pension plans, Social Security payments, and other assets will combine to generate a flow of monthly income that's much smaller than what we had grown accustomed to spending during our working lives. As people in scores of other countries demonstrate every day, it's possible to live comfortably on even only a small fraction of the average American retiree's Social Security check. So it might seem that future retirees could get along well enough simply by tightening their belts. But it would be a mistake to think that cutting back would be simple or painless.

Retirees can and will tighten their belts, but that won't be enough, because ...