[sokoloff]

I take your point on not accounting for interest growth. Well explained. Thank you.

My actual retirement is my defined contribution 401(k) account. The amount I put in now grows until I draw it down in retirement. There’s no one who will give me a year of their 401(k) drawdown, of course. What 401(k) money I and my wife don’t spend is part of our estate and inherited just like any other type of private savings.

Defined benefit plans (“private pensions”) are rare (and becoming more rare) for the current workforce.

Social Security is more than a rounding error in the retirement picture, but it’s by far the minority of income for most professional jobs. That’s literally the only “pension style money” that’s available to me and it’s about $1400/mo as far as I can tell. That's not going to take the typical 25-year old new parent very far I don't think. (It's slightly over the federal minimum wage for one full-time worker.)

Edit to add some stats/refs:

[0] - 4% of private sectors workers have only defined-benefit plan (down from 60% in the 1980s) 14% of private sector employees have access to both - https://money.cnn.com/retirement/guide/pensions_basics.money...

[1] - https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/factsheet/defined-benefit-frozen....

[ghaff]

$1400 is average. Assuming a decent professional salary and depending on when you retire, it could be closer to $2,000-$3,000.

But of course your basic point stands. Absent a separate defined-benefit pension (which still exist from older jobs in some cases), SS is fairly minimal by itself even if you own a house.

[sokoloff]

Thanks for the data on the top of range.

You are though, by definition, taking away an average benefit from those who would retire to give to parents, so I think average is the right reference figure when contemplating "what would the parental benefit be if funded from social security delays?"

[ben_w]

> I take your point on not accounting for interest growth. Well explained. Thank you.

Thanks for the compliment, I’m glad to see I’m improving :)