So, like many boomers, I have a 401k that represents basically my entire retirement fund. Unlike many boomers, I am under the age of 50.
I'm sure there's plenty of other millennials, and possibly even younger generations, who have simple, relatively hands-off accounts from jobs where you just diverted a percentage of your paycheck. It's not flashy or trendy, and it's kinda old-school - like the employers we got them from.
With the market being about as stable as a cement mixer full of nitroglycerin, what are we to do?
I've thrown some pocket change into the Meme War on Wall Street, but if this triggers a collapse, there goes my 'retirement' (as though that could ever happen given current trends). What should I and people like me be looking out for?
I go back and forth between wishing I had gone into IT like most of my friends so I could make bank working from home, and being glad I work for a small company where my boss's dad teaches her son to reload ammo for fun and profit and I get to make jokes about Covid in front of whoever I want.
I wonder the same thing sometimes, but from the other side. The town I grew up in was one of those small towns that people tended to not leave.
I left the town I grew up in 15 years ago, and I regard the one I'm in now as a pit stop. A long pit stop, to be sure, but we're looking ahead as far as we can see now.
Next step is a house. Gotta fight to get the credit where we need it, and then somehow manage a job and house at the same time in a place we want to be and then execute.
I'm mildly terrified.
The town I grew up in isn't the town I grew up in anymore: thanks globalism and illegal immigration.
Houses are terrifying. I bought my first one when I was way too young, and it flipped the "adult" switch in my brain where I could no longer do the whole "stay up until 6am and sleep until 2pm" thing I did in college. Good luck.