Anyone who never put anyway anything for their old age was irresponsible
Wow. I guess you don’t know anyone who earns lower wages, or has had a shorter career time (moms returning to the work world after raising kids, for example). Medical or education debt can make it hard to save for retirement.
But sure, go ahead and judge people who don’t have lots of money and luck as being “irresponsible”. I’m rather surprised to hear this from you – I thought you had more empathy than that.
Not all people are raised the same, I guess.
I was taught from the get-go that the tithing to my church and my savings should be the first money expenditures each month. There were times my income was mighty small. Had to live very frugally to make that work.
Nowadays, values like that are not only not taught to most people, but mocked. Everyone knows the government should take care of those who “cannot.” When the consequences of unwise behavior are removed, bad behavior becomes more common.
As an employer, I have seen so many employees completely cash out their retirement next egg upon leaving my employ, paying all the taxes and penalties to buy stupid luxuries- even when they have a better job lined up immediately after leaving my employ.
Self discipline is the quality most often missing in human beings.
You’re a dentist… I think comparing your experience with those in the bottom 50% of income isn’t the most accurate way to judge performance.
That being said… 
most dentists and doctors I know, with a few exceptions, have the same attitude.
But you would not really know anything about my earnings, would you?
Why do you assume that my working life started when I got my doctorate?
I will admit one thing: I could not save any money for the first 1 1/2 years of rural practice, when the worst drought in 70 years nearly bankrupted me.
Thereafter $26-$30K was not a lot of dough as a Navy dentist even in 1985. Yet I managed to pay off most of my practice debt, support my wife, and fully fund my IRA, which had a $2000 a year max at the time. I kept both of our old cars running.
It was $30K to $35K working for others for four years after that, and I still managed to tithe, fully fund the IRA each year, AND put money away in an annuity. I still drove early 1970s cars and lived in a two bedroom bungalow.
With most people, it is not the lack of income, but the self-discipline with money management that makes the difference. I know plenty of immigrants who are secure with a house, paid-off car, and sometimes a business because they had a good work ethic and had self-discipline with money.
On the other hand, I see plenty of patients with good incomes who complain about not being able to afford health care, yet have no trouble paying lease payments on an expensive car, weekly hair care, eating out a lot, manicures and pedicures, eyelash extensions, tattoos, and care for their pets.
As I said, self-discipline is the quality most lacking in human beings.
I learned about how dental practices operate in the 1970’s when I worked for IBM. Whenever an assigned sales territory had sufficient market-sector sales opportunities like, govt, banking, manufacturing, medical, etc. IBM would make available, to that marketing rep a crash-course for those specialties. They were usually conducted by seasoned industry specialists and sometimes the qualified professionals themselves.
Dental practice earnings are pretty easy to figure out, one dentist can only drill & bill so many hours a day, fill so many chairs and rent so much office space. After 4-10 chairs, if you want to grow your income, you’ll have have to branch out with more qualified dentists.
Most dentists I know personally level out after 5-10 years or start spending their time managing a multi-dentist operation and spend more time at a desk than a treatment chair.
I have one friend who is a periodontist with no office, he just makes the rounds of many on an as-needed basis. A orthodontic specialist friend has three or four staffed offices and several dentists with four to twelve chair single offices.
Many people have humble beginnings, dentists and docs are no exception, but I find that most folks considered wealthy soon forget the many unfortunate things that can stall or prevent self-sufficiency in old age.
If you have a comfortable retirement, no matter who you are or how hard you worked, there’s a bit of luck involved.
So now we know the source of your Perfect Knowledge of Everything- IBM assignments in the 1970s. Beats a graduate degree education or a lifetime of experience, I guess.
The tiny knowledge you had about my profession or any others is long outdated. A lot of things have changed in 50 years. Overhead, school loan debt, implants, and the gigantic share of non-dentist, corporate practice ownership are some that come to mind. The days of a 50% profit margin were gone a long time ago.
Self-employed dentists- like medical doctors or lawyers for that matter- are businessmen. Some are very shrewd like Elon Musk, and make a lot of money. They get all the press. Some fail miserably, as I did in my first rural practice. Most are in-between.
I will never earn as much and have so much free time as my father, a pilot for a major airline. Neither will most dentists I know. One superb dentist in our class actually left practice to fly for Delta Airlines.
We have the money to fix social security but we spending money on all these other useless agendas. We gave Ukraine almost a 1/4 of a trillion dollars in aid, but we should spend the money and resources on America first. So much wasteful spending through the federal govt that could easily have been used to fix our budgeting issues. But politicians can’t get a cut back by helping out the American citizens. No reason for us to go around playing world police.
Gee, I wonder if activist judges blocking access to systems or gaslighting MSM inciting violence has slowed down the auditing?
I worked for IBM until the nineties and have had from three to five dentists in my social sphere since the 1980’s. The dentist business is not hard to figure out. From all the conversations I’ve had with people in the business it sounds like a pretty boring way to make a living.
Gee, Musk and his team are so careful in their procedures in demolishing out nation’s critical information systems. HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?
Musk Team Leaves Access to Sensitive Data Open and Russians Immediately Attempt Access
Reuters.com
Sure, someone doing read-only reporting on almost-certainly cuts of data and not even production systems somehow caused a data breach. It’s a great headline though!
What the heck does “read-only reporting on almost-certainly cuts of data” mean?
Thes people are not innocent niave users. They are very skilled professionals and they created a separate group of users with external access without 2-factor user authentication. Then they left those users actiive in the system while erasing all the evidence of their activity. The whisleblower reportedly has real-time evidence of what was happening.
Reporting requires read access only, and it’s often done on data that has been exported/copied from the production database to a data warehouse in a format that is reporting-friendly.
They are very skilled professionals and they created a separate group of users with external
access without 2-factor user authentication. Then they left those users actiive in the system
while erasing all the evidence of their activity.
Sounds like pure fantasy. Again, the system access they would be given should be read-only. And the granting of that access would be by a separate group of administrators who are already working there and should know how to provision logins with the appropriate access and revoke them as necessary.
There are so many holes in this story, that it’s hard to take seriously.
In a normal world your assumptions about the situation would be reasonable. Anyone seeking information leading to fraudulent payments etc. would just need a user account and read-only access. Existing IT management and security people would simply grant the DOGE teams that level of access.
However, today we are not in a normal world when it comes to DOGE and their “investigations” of our federal agencies, institutions and govt-supported non-profit organizations. In multiple cases DOGE personnel have booted existing staff out of the building taken over everything in it including the IT operations.
The situation at NLRB is just coming to light and we’ll see where it goes. So far the effort by the whistleblower to enlist the help of CISA has been stalled by NLRB higher-ups without explanation.
According to the whistle-blower’s affidavit the DOGE team was escorted thru NLRB security by police. Once in the building they demanded the highest level of IT systems security and began establishing new user accounts. When an IT staffer suggested a streamlined process to activate those accounts in a way that would let their activities be tracked, in accordance with NLRB security policies, the IT staffers were told to stay out of DOGE’s way, the disclosure continues.
Musk himself has a conflict of interest in this situation, (one of many in his DOGE activities,) in that there on-going complaints against Musk-owned businesses. DOGE staffers had access to ALL information in the NLRB system and could have easily removed, replaced or modified and information in the system and erased all evidence of any changes that they made.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-securityppl
There would only be a risk of SS going away,if the promised benefits were in money.They are Dollar promises and government can create Dollars at no cost.The risk is the purchasing power of the Dollars,when received.
My first thought is with your voluminous knowledge of the business side of dentistry, it should be a simple task to obtain a lucrative position teaching pre-doc students business courses in an accredited dental school somewhere.
But then I thought, “With all the knowledge he has gained from IBM, surely he can petition a school to take the National Boards without even going to dental school, then go ahead and take the state board afterwards to enable opening his own practice.”
But finally I realized, “Certainly with his superior intellect, knowledge gained from friends and IBM projects, why limit himself to dentistry? Go ahead and take the Medical national boards, and petition to be recognized in an advanced specialty like pediatric oncology by oral exam. Surely his mastery of the subject would impress any expert medical panel. The sky is the limit with superior knowledge and intellect like his.”
Well thank you Henrius, but you’re too kind.
Having been raised in a family in the lower income quartile my vocational objective as an adult was to make a decent income. As a high-school dropout my options were limited but after testing out to a 2-year college GED equivalency in the military I was able to land a job as a field tech with IBM.
After watching IBM salesmen make two or three times as much as I made for five years as a tech rep, I walked into the branch sales manager’s office and ask for a sales job. He said that if I could work a remote territory for two years as a sales/tech combo rep and make sales quota and exceed tech support goals he would give me a job. I did and for my last 23 years at IBM I held various marketing, planning and account manager positions. In my IBM career of thirty years I probably averaged six-eight weeks a year in some kind of specialized IBM formal training, usually technical, industry specialization or personal development.
After retiring and taking a sabbatical blue-water sailing for a while I tried my hand at being a K-12 technology consultant and after 3 years at that, (very frustrating) went into real estate sales, where the real money was to be made.
I found most of those things pretty interesting and preferred something new and a little different every couple of years or so.
I don’t think I could stand being a teacher for very long, and I certainly couldn’t handle being a dentist or a doctor. I have a lot of admiration for people that can handle those jobs. If I was to be any kind of doc it would be an orthopod, they seem to be the happiest with their jobs.
It seems now it’s being admitted that all of this was an incredible lie, or at the very least the product of the imagination of someone with very serious TDS/EDS.