From an April, 2021 CNBC article:

https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-retirement-savings-by-state/

Only one western state, Alaska, cracked the top five. Could this be one of the consequences of paying a 10% tithe?

I do think paying tithing has contributed to low retirement savings.

Retired TBM's will keep paying it from their savings.

In our case, we spent what would have been a good chunk of retirement money on tithing before we ever thought of retiring.
Whenever hubby told me that we can't afford to pay it, I would argue with him and tell him that he had no faith and that he was an infidel. He would cave in to my demands to pay it; even if we had use a credit card.

I blame myself for the financial mess we got in by paying tithing; I wish we could sue TSCC and get that money back.

Isn't Jesus going to pay the bills after His return?

Tithing without a doubt is a big factor.

I would submit that serving a mission is another huge factor.

A two year delay in schooling, job tenure and retirement savings is devastating.

Your social security check is based on your top 30 years of employment. So the overall average of a person with two less years of earning and/or two less years of higher earnings will affect their pay out their entire lives.

Two years less of money invested can be substantial. It is in the latter years that the most growth happens.

At 10 percent on an account with $500,000 would result in $50,000 in earnings the first year and $55,000 the second year.

I have several coworkers, my same age, that served missions that will have to work two to three years longer just to get to where I was when I retired.

Then add in the cost of student loans.

Instead of saving for college, mormons save for missions.

Your correct on your observation.

I set aside money for my kids mission, between clothing, monthly payments, transportation, and the money sent here and there to keep them fed. It was a financial drain.

Add in the tithing, fast offerings, ward budgets, delay in education and such. Low estimate taking growth into consideration starts at $250,000, but as I said that is a "low" estimate.

Fortunately when I saw the cost of the first mission I began to worry about retirement, so I backed off big time on the tithing. Plus, I was in the middle of a divorce. So those two major financial events outside of normal daily costs taught me a big lesson about securing my future.

Besides tithing, large families are probably another contributing factor.

Other possible factors:

Spending money to look prosperous and righteous (aka keeping up with the Joneses)

Thinking God will provide if you pay tithing

Low wages, especially for women

Outrageous child care expenses if women do work

Increased medical expenses not covered by insurance

Married too early before getting education (especially women)

Sell out politicians who do everything to pad rich and corporate profits while doing nothing (ever!) to help the middle and lower class

I had a brief conversation with a 21-year-old yesterday while I was out walking. (We were both eating at a Chinese fast food place, waiting for our orders.)

He sparked my interest because he was neat, tidy, organized, well-groomed, and other out-of-the-ordinary adjectives.  I figured he had a chance of keeping up with clear, organized speech and I was right.

He's a STEM major, doing his pre-med.  He recognizes that he's weird, viz a viz his peer group.

He's paying $18,000 for next semester's 15 credits...  That's $1,200 per credit.  I cannot recall what my kids paid per credit hour at CalStateColleges, but it was nowhere close to being that much.

I told him he wasn't going to believe what I paid the last couple of semesters before my graduation: $15/credit hour.  He pulled out his phone, accessed a calculator and showed me the total: $225 dollars.

Gladys Lot would love this kid, but he's wired too soundly, too competently, for my tastes.

If kids are paying $36,000/year for school, not counting food and lodging, are they also borrowing for said food and lodging?

I'm not sensing that Americans are much into "one for all and all for one!"  I see a lot of "one for me and all for me!"

elderolddog Wrote:
->
> I'm not sensing that Americans are much into "one
> for all and all for one!"  I see a lot of "one
> for me and all for me!"

This pretty wells sums up our society these days. I see this every day when I drive home. Todays driving moto should be:

"Damn the physics of objects in motion, full speed ahead and get out of my way."

Yes, pretty much. I was surprised today when another driver, seeing that I was having difficulty making a left turn, waived me in front of her.

I routinely give people the right-of-way when I don't have to.

Not because I'm a nice guy, but because I'm never in a hurry, and I love to piss off the people behind me.

I get a lot of smiles and waves in return ... but not from the people behind me.

May I submit another reason? Up until fairly recently, wives and mothers were seriously discouraged from working outside the home (curiously, nurses and teachers seemed exempt). When DH was the bishop, we were in quite dire straits and I got a job. OMG, the shunning and gossip were terrible.

If I had advanced my career in the early years of our marriage, I would have been in a much better place financially. As it was, it was in my late 40's and after divorcing that I really buckled down and tried to catch up with my retirement savings. I also stopped paying tithing then, too.

I was just going to say that. A significant percentage of women in Utah don't go to college, or don't graduate, don't work outside the home, and raise more than the US average number of children, and children are expensive. All of that negatively affects income.

Utah has more than its fair share of college educated men, and quite a lot of white collar workers compared to the number of blue collar workers. It ought to be a pretty high GDP per capita state, yet it is not. I blame that mostly on how women fare in Utah. Can't blame tithing for low GDP.

Take a look. Last year Utah was not even in the top half. And in past years it has been even lower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP

Edit to add: oops, I had the table sorted by gross GDP, not GDP per capita. Utah was 21 in q2, 31 in q3.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/31/2022 12:37AM by Brother Of Jerry.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I was just going to say that. A significant
> percentage of women in Utah don't go to college,
> or don't graduate, don't work outside the home,
> and raise more than the US average number of
> children, and children are expensive.

And then they get divorced.

I like to be supportive of women's choices, but I do believe that most women are best served by working a good chunk of their adult lives at a job that pays decently. Divorce or death of a spouse are real possibilities, and one must be prepared.

My mom was widowed in her 40s. My dad had life insurance and investments, but what really hurt her over the next 35-40 years was inflation. She was also not properly educated in personal finance and investments. She could have done a lot better over her remaining years with more knowledge in these areas.

> I like to be supportive of women's choices, but I
> do believe that most women are best served by
> working a good chunk of their adult lives at a job
> that pays decently.

I believe the interests of men and children and society are best served by that life choice. Strict economic logic would dictate that all women and all men should live lives with the optimal payoff given their individual endowments. That would mean that on average half of women (and half of men) should dedicate their lives to meaningful professional work and the other half of women (and men) should prioritize housekeeping and child rearing. Furthermore, the individual decision should, ignoring some degree of genetic predisposition, be independent of gender. Anything short of such a distribution of labor choices deprives the species of the optimum output of all "goods," be they economic, artistic, philosophical, or other.

That does not mean the individual does not get to make her own choices, but it does mean that societal expectations should treat women as equal to men in terms of rights, responsibilities and opportunities.

Another cruel irony in this is that given the morg’s strategy of rewarding and propping up the succe$$ful, even if people finally figure out that the mormon lifestyle hurts them financially, TSCC can just point at the ”leadership” as success stories of people who are ”living right.” In other words, more gaslighting and blaming the victims.

+Yep

I was a stay at home mom till I resigned from the lds church in 2013. Husband is working for the same company for over 15 years and paying into his retirement fund. Well 2013 I went back to work part time. My children were 1,3 and 5 years old. Slowly but surely I started my 401k. My goal was to be a stay at home mom till the children turn 18. Several of my cousins got bachelor's degrees and since having had their first child they stayed home and never went back to work they gave all their time to children and church callings.

I never knew one rich person who ever retired. The ones I knew ran their own businesses and continued to run them until their health gave out or they died. My dad never retired nor did my grandfather.

All my rich friends (ok, all one of them) is technically not retired, but work mostly consists of opening dividend checks from apartment complexes she is part owner of.

It’s easy to not retire when other people are hired to do most of the actual work. It’s really hard to tell the difference between that and being retired.

My grandma turned 90 this year. Back in the 1960 not many LDS women were working she was one of the few working women in her ward. Some people called her a bad mother for working outside the home and said she should follow the prophet and stay home. When my grandpa lost his job all the family finances were on my grandma and she was proud of herself for following her gut in going back to work.

Your grandmother was a trailblazer. I grew up in the 1960s, and even among nevermos back then, working women were viewed with suspicion. It wasn't until the mid-70s to 80s that women started to enter the workforce in large numbers.

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Your grandmother was a trailblazer. I grew up in
> the 1960s, and even among nevermos back then,
> working women were viewed with suspicion. It
> wasn't until the mid-70s to 80s that women started
> to enter the workforce in large numbers.


I had no idea! Go grandma!

I remember a conversation I had with my bishop a year or so before the 2008 crash. He said that he was worried because so many members of the ward were living so close to the edge financially. I don’t live in Utah, but the area I live in is very affluent, and contains a higher than expected number of Mormons.

My wife and I both had fairly high paying jobs (I have since retired), we’d never had kids, and yet our house is modest compared to so many of the McMansions around us. We often wondered how so many people could afford such expensive homes. I suppose we got our answer when we saw so many bank repossessions in 2008 and 2009. Yes, many of our Mormon neighbors had high incomes, but they also often had large families and SAH moms.

Sorry, I could not help myself.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2020/07/young-adults/the-how-why-when-and-where-of-saving-money?lang=eng
Pay tithing first!

https://wallethub.com/edu/most-and-least-charitable-states/8555

If I was snarky I could say that the blessings of paying tithing is a low retirement saving.

I am not against people giving to charity by any means. I am sad that the 100 billion dollar rainy day fund church requires tithing even from it's poorest members ("tithing breaks the poverty cycle" to poor people in Africa).

I "guess" me not getting the divorce saved us pretty much??? I kept the house and paid most of it off until I made him take over after I found out I DO GET HALF HIS PENSION and it is paid off now. He lives downstairs and I live upstairs.

He didn't have to pay me child support or spousal support and I worked 2 jobs for quite a few years.

My siblings are all doing well financially after retiring. One is a divorcee and was a single mother for a long time. I have one brother who isn't retired, but he'll be fine. He does great with money and he has a very good job.

Most of us were not paying tithing for most our adult lives and I quit at age about 38.