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I mean, that's basically what US Social Security is. It also has a cap, and poorer people actually get a little more out of it than they put in, while higher earners get less. It's just that it doesn't pay enough to work on its own.

The old idea was that the US would have three legs of retirement: Social Security, 401k's, and traditional corporate pensions. Each of these has downsides, but a failure in one can be propped up by the other two. However, Social Security is being pilfered, corporate pensions rarely exist unless you have one of the unions that has maintained power until now, and 401k's are too subject to the wild rides of the stock market.

That seems like a good addition, although at least for younger people i'd still prefer stocks over the safer annuities, since with a longer time horizon you can weather out some of the fluctuations for higher returns.

Your funds might be in a HYSA but the bank holding them probably has them in stocks and bonds.

So if the stocks fall enough you won't have your money anyways.

Now you could say you want to hold onto cash instead, but the only fix for the banks not having money is to print money which makes cash worth less.

Okay but what if you held gold or other minerals. Well the value of those comes from the perception that they could be used to trade when other things fail, but even if milk is $500 a gallon no grocery store is going to take gold as it isn't able to be insured and tracked. So the value of gold also will drop as it can't actually be used for goods and services.

So basically you can't isolate yourself and protect yourself from societies stupidity. Its all a gamble and maybe your option works out or maybe it doesn't but there isn't a clear way to avoid the problem.

To be fair i think times are rarely normal. Just since 2000 we've had the dot com bubble, great financial crisis, covid pandemic, ukraine war and now this. Although the current situation feels like a particularly unforced and unnecessary one. And before that there were also plenty of other crisis from world wars, the cold war with things like the cuban missile crisis or the 1973 oil crisis.

HYSA with those rates certainly seem like an appealing place to be in the current market, but as always this is a question about market timing, which is hard to impossible. When did you exit your positions and when do you plan to reenter? Because as said with the recent drops on a wide market scale we are still only down to levels just before the US election and nobody knows how things will play out in the future.

So my point still stands that anyone who is finding himself in acute issues due to the current market changes has done poor risk management. Broad market etfs are meant for a long term investment horizon of 10-15 years exactly so one can weather out downturns. And if someone is close to retirment it would have been prudent to shift some portion of savings into more stable investments similar to how target date funds handle it. Which might still be a good move right now, as the losses are still within reason, assuming a diversified investment strategy (and not something like having bought tesla at peak or the trump meme coin).

It's good to have 3 months to a year of expenses saved in an HYSA to start with as a rainy day fund you can use in an emergency (i.e. lose your job/house, etc.). I think there are some studies that a huge portion of the population doesn't have savings to cover even a surprise $1000 expense.

That's more important than putting money in the stock market to start with but after you have that you can put your savings into an IRA or something preferably in a diversified fund. (Vanguard has a few tgat are specifically targeted for retirement at particular years).