Originally Posted by
jaxsurf
Who cares what people use their money on? Why is it any of your business?
If you’re so concerned with how people spend their money, how about we all just let the government take care of us? The State could plan all of our retirements for us, that way nobody would use their retirement money for non-retirement purposes, like opening a business or buying real estate
So is your position that a professional, such as ourselves, should be on the hook in their off time to buy real estate, start a side gig, or otherwise find a wiz-bang (likely high risk) way to fund a reasonable retirement?
Have you forgotten that professional pilots used to show up to work, fly their trips, and 25 years later belly up to a 60% FAE retirement. No extra effort required.
Some basic math (and realistic assumptions) prove that, even with higher DC contributions and additional individual deferrals, a 401k can never get us there unless you happen to hit the equivalent of a TSLA or AMZN at just the right moment. I don’t want to own a business or buy red-state real estate. I want to fly airplanes and expect to have a comfortable retirement as part of the deal, just like generations of pilots before me did.
Several have mentioned that the MBCBP is stealing their excess, but the amount of excess received is driven directly by (1) 401k limits, (2) our DC contribution amount, and (3) any individual deferrals done prior to reaching 401k limits.
Is it possible that the current 401k limits and our current 16% contribution just happens to be the perfect nexus of factors which produces the perfect amount of DC excess cash for these individuals? If not, then why the reluctance to see DC cash allocated in an additional tax deferred option? And why not just take the 16% as cash in the first place? In that case the union may just need to publish an updated retirement guidebook that includes instructions on owning self storage facilities or mobile home parks.
This doesn’t seem like a productive road for a unionized group of professionals to go down, en masse.
Just food for thought.
Obviously having the ability to opt-out would be ideal, but I don’t see the angst in the union trying to provide a greater company-paid retirement benefit than we currently have. Is this not the way bargaining is supposed to work?
If there is a genuine uprising against the MBCBP amongst Delta pilots, then the message being sent is that we are good with 16% and a 401k for the rest of time, because increasing contributions will only drive more taxable income for most at this point, and there simply aren’t other tax-qualified options on the shelf offered by our benevolent government.