The 401K Famine

No BLLSHT, but I've already accepted that if I want to retire at a reasonable age I'll have to move to another country (as long as they have surf, I'll be a-okay). This decade has become a lost fucking cause. The market has ended where it began. I've made no interest on what I've invested in and no one I know has, either (believe it or not I, and my buds, have our shit together, for the most part).

Wonder if they have retirement communities in Somalia?

For those of us unfortunate enough to be in our 30s and 40s, the outlook is overwhelmingly dismal. Shackled to huge mortgages we have neither the option of fleeing a country which saw GDP plunge 7.1% in 2009 or of scraping by until retirement. Overwhelmingly we are employed in the private sector and so, in addition to staring at the ceiling each night worrying about negative equity andthe looming flurry of tax increases, we fret whether we'll be in a job next
month (with unemployment tipping 14%, our paranoia is justified).

And now, the final insult. As we woke the morning after Black Thursday to survey the smoking crater that is the economy, it was with the knowledge that it is we who will be made to pay for the venality and corruption of a business and political class almost exclusively drawn from the ranks of the generation ahead of us (I know of nobody my age who has ever voted for the party of cronyism and patronage, Fianna Fail, while all our parents did so religiously).