NYT Columnist John Tierney visits a college friend of his who’s now an economist in Chile, and compares national pension system (Social Security) payouts:

“Pablo called up his account on his computer (!) … After comparing our relative payments to our pension systems (since salaries are higher in America, I had contributed more), we extrapolated what would have happened if I’d put my money into Pablo’s mutual fund instead of the Social Security trust fund. We came up with three projections for my old age, each one offering a pension that, like Social Security’s, would be indexed to compensate for inflation:

(1) Retire in 10 years, at age 62, with an annual pension of $55,000. That would be more than triple the $18,000 I can expect from Social Security at that age.

(2) Retire at age 65 with an annual pension of $70,000. That would be almost triple the $25,000 pension promised by Social Security starting a year later, at age 66.

(3)Retire at age 65 with an annual pension of $53,000 and a one-time cash payment of $223,000.”

The secret? The Chilean system uses those scary 401k - style private accounts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 12:16 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under I knew I'd use my Econ major, Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.