| > I self insure my car and my house. You have liability insurance for anyone you may hurt with your car. It's a low probability, catastrophic life event, that makes more sense to insure, than to save for. Yes, liability insurance only goes so far in truly catastrophic events, and yes, you can do things with lawyers, but insurance covers most of the serious unlikely problems you may have. > I have spare versions of both. Self-insuring a house by owning a second one is not a good plan for the overwhelming majority of human beings. > However, I have seen nursing home care and other non family provided care for super old people, and I would rather kill myself if I had to depend on that (I support assisted suicide). Okay - that's an entirely other story. When I am talking about support, I am talking about truly basic life needs. Food, shelter, transportation. None of these are prohibitively expensive, when you have a small income. A pension can't really afford intensive-end-of-life care, or long-term medium-intensity care. Hardly any kind of savings that you can scrape together can. > If this is the goal, then isn't the whole country the best pool? AKA Social Security? Yes, social security is a pension program. I wish I could invest more than 5% of my retirement savings into it, for the reasons I outlined above. |