The most colorful newspaper in all the land (USA Today) has a scary article today about our growing Pension crisis. You didn't know that we have a pension crisis? Well, we do, and its growing. Basically it goes like this: Pension were designed to help (not fully fund, but help) people with their retirement income. The other two forms of retirement income are Social Security (insert Al Gore lockbox joke here) and personal retirement savings (yes, you are suppossed to have personal retirement savings). Pensions were typically paid by large corporations and government agencies. If you worked for a big company or "the man", then you were pretty much set for life. They would pay for your health care, they would pay for your retirement, and they would help purchase the supplies that you would use to make fruit cake during the holidays.

Well, people are living longer and longer, and it is becoming increasingly hard to fund these long lives. More and more people retire every year, and they live longer than the  people that retired the year before them. You can see that this gets quite complicated (think Quentin Tarintino movie plot). There is a Pension Guarantee Fund that is run by the government, but then again that gets us back to their prowess with Social Security. The government employees are having a less difficult time than the big company employees, but I personally think that it is just a matter of time before the government pension plan starts to sour too.

It is quite sad because these employees have dedicated their lives to these organizations. The younger generations don't have this same mentality. We are into our jobs, but we don't view this as giving our lives for our employers. My generation's loner mentality may be a good thing because the solution to this problem is doing your retirement savings by yourself.

We use to describe retirement as a three legged stool. One leg was your pension, another was Social Security, and the third was your personal savings. Seeing as how pensions are going away, we are now on two legs. And seeing how I have as much confidence in Social Security as I do in Britney Spears as a role model, we are now down to one leg. Hmmm...a one legged stool. You better hope that it is bolted to the floor.

Pension gap divides public and private workers (USA Today)