Random Spiel, The Rise of Silver Squatters

Imagine someone started working for the government decades ago and had part of their income used to pay for government pension. While inflation did it's work devaluing the country's currency for decades, the wage rate didn't catch up to cover this inflation. Now in comes their time to retire, and the retiree figures out that they retired at a bad time in their country's economic history. The pension fund managers, policy makers, and economists did not foresee that the cost of living went higher than their previous estimates. Retirees relying on their monthly pension to sustain themselves for the remaining years now have to budget their money because the meds for their chronic disease got expensive, their rent went up, and the cost of living went up.

I encountered the term Silver Squatters which I find catchy. It's when old people near retirement age and up live with their now older children for financial dependency. The rich boomer stereotype doesn't apply for everyone. They bunk with their older children because their pensions could've keep up with today's cost of living. This phenomenon may sound new to the West but extended family setups are ingrained in the Filipino culture, or Asian culture in general. Filial piety includes entertaining the idea that we'll be bunking with our parents than sending them to nursing homes. There's always that one sibling in charge of taking care of the parents while the rest can have a nuclear family setup.

I didn't look at the Silver Squatter phenomenon as a bad thing because that's the culture I grew as a norm. But then I read on some random forum online making a commentary on how Filipinos abroad would send a lot of their money earned back to their family in the Philippines. Responsibilities like the eldest sibling has to provide financial support for their other sibling's education, and etc. have all been ingrained into the culture and this contributes to why Filipinos remain poor. Filial piety is a bitch, it's not that most younger gens don't realize it as a problem, they do know it's a problem, but there's little they can do because that's just the family culture here works.

Of course, all of this tragedy could've been averted if these people were born from rich families. Maybe they could've tried their luck at investing when everything was going up in value.

What's the government's solution? pass more policies to promote welfare for the elderly. I'm not against seniors getting more benefits from the government but more and more of these just adds more strain to the abled people that are funding the programs through taxes. Some proposals to reduce the impact of social welfare costs the government pays include increasing the age of retirement or raising taxes to the younger age group that's still able to work. It's usually the older population that is in position to promote these policies and it just so happens that they are enthusiastic about raising their own benefits as they come near retirement age. That's how one generation fucks up the next generation.

When I made a post about how no one working at a 9-5 job became rich (unless they come from an already wealthy family), I'm going to add that no one work at a 9-5 job lived happily depending only on their pension benefits after they retired. By my own experiences with talking to people that have retired from government positions anyway. Now how bad is it for people who lived most of their working lives on a contractual basis and no pension benefits especially in the private sector? I'm just humoring myself at the idea contemplating how the Philippines may end up decades from now. And this phenomenon isn't even exclusive to this country, it happens to all capitalist societies when the wealth inequality widens.

Learning from the Filipino culture, if the number of Silver Squatters in a nation increases, then this creates a situation when the next generation experiences a greater financial burden than the previous generation because now they shoulder two other generations' financial burden along with the rising costs of living. One could make the argument that this is just an exaggeration and that's understandable if you live in a culture that doesn't value filial piety.

Thanks for your time.