From Ann Barnhardt:
ON 401KS
POSTED BY ANN BARNHARDT – AUGUST 3, AD 2012 7:26 PM MST
401k plan of attack:
1. STOP MAKING CONTRIBUTIONS if you haven’t already.
2. Liquidate it. Pay the “penalty”. Would you rather pay a penalty or have it all stolen? Or possibly replaced with a “government savings account” comprised of Treasury paper which will probably default or be confiscated long before you are ever allowed to “tap it”, and will NOT be able to be passed to your heirs should you croak, but will instead be resorbed back into the collective? Oh, and don’t bother whining to me about the “tax consequences”. Paying income taxes to this satanic baby-killing Christ-hating government is now, absolutely MORTAL SIN. Why, why, why would you pay taxes?
3. If you can’t liquidate it, take out a loan on the balance. Take out the maximum possible loan, and then set up the repayment schedule on the longest possible term.
Now, let’s talk about all of you out there who are not permitted by your employer to liquidate your 401k. That decision rests with the PLAN ADMINISTRATOR, who is your employer, be it an individual or a board.
What kind soulless, psychopathic monster would refuse to let their own employees have access to their own money? What POSSIBLE reason could there be for a business owner or a board to refuse to fill out a few forms, sign at a few documents and just let people have their own money?
If your employer will not let you out of your 401k, you need to sit down and think long and hard about who you are working for, and why you are working for them, because they are, by definition, bad people.
Finally, what lesson can we learn from this? How about this: If you don’t have access to something, if you cannot take physical possession of it, if all you have is someone telling you that they are taking care of your money, which you cannot touch or have access to – THEN IT ISN’T YOUR MONEY, AND IT NEVER WAS. In short, you have been conned.
If your employer won’t let you liquidate your 401k, that means that your employer has CONNED YOU by telling you that they were paying you a wage of X, when in reality it was less than X by the amount of your 401k contribution amount. Go sit down and figure it out. Back out your 401K contributions off the top of your pay as if they never existed. THAT is your actual wage, if your employer refuses to let you out. Would you have ever agreed to work for that wage?
For those of you who come out on the other side of this collapse and war, you must always remember that if an asset is not FULLY liquid and available to you, then it isn’t really yours at all, and you have to assume that all such arrangements are nefarious and must be rejected.
Another option in addition to the loan is something called a 72T withdrawal. It can be done without penalty in a couple of ways and may be of use to some, depending upon your conditions. Research it on the IRS web site and elsewhere and see if it’s for you.
Mine has the no liquidation clause in it. So I quit throwing money away into it after reading an article on Zerohedge, and took the loan for the max (one half). That was a prerequisite to claim hardship withdrawals. To do those, I simply withhold the mortgage payment for two months. I get a nasty form letter from my lender, which I then fax into the 401k managing entity and they cut me a check for the amount, plus the late payment penalty, with the “taxes” added even. I then use that to pay the mortgage. Rinse, repeat and I’m whittling it down a bit at a time. I will get hit for the 10% taxes next year, since they’re considered income by the leeches, but then we’ll just have to see if we even make it to next April. I hope so, since I’ve been budgeting preps in that I wouldn’t have been able to afford othewise.
Check your plans fine print, and see what yours says. Best of luck people.
+1 million on Barnhardt’s advice. Take what you can OUT: invest in gold, silver, land, paying off mortgage early, anything substantive. Paper is only good as the promise behind it, and in the days of “Hope and Change”, paper — like sacrosanct debt contracts — mean diddly.
Any fool still in the market is only getting fleeced by the High Frequency Trading computers that high-priced investment banks deploy. When those algos have stolen 40-50% of the value of your account through preferential trading arrangements, the FEDGOV will swoop in to “save your retirement” by nationalizing your 401K and “investing” what you have left in government bonds — they’ll call it the “Patriot Tax” and rob you blind.
Read Zerohedge several times a day — one of the few sites left that still speaks truth to power. Also recommend “The Quants” and “Dark Pools” by Scott Patterson. Eye-opening, to say the least.
Came to these same conclusions over 30 years ago. I you don’t control it it ain’t yours, simple logic.
I used to have a very nice collection of “The Coming Crash” books, Some had years in the title, or decades: The Coming Crash of the 1980s. Ravi Batra made a good living seling these books. But none of those events every happened.
Will the hyper-inflation happen? Don’t know. I’m not a future teller, and I notice that a lot of people who think they are turn out to be wrong.
It makes sense to diversify and to have assets that you control. Does it make sense to stop paying taxes? No, not really. Not if it means you are going to go to jail. So given that you are not going to take that route (probably because you can’t afford to sop working) then the bite on redeeming your 401K is more like 50% penalty.
Choice: lose 1/2 your savings now, or risk losing 100% later, because SB says the government are crooks and will steal it eventually.? Not so obvious a choice, especially when I look over at the shelf of doom and gloom books.
I was pretty worried about Y2K. I worked for a systems software company, and we did a lot of work to patch our systems prior to Y2K., But I knew the problem was real. I remember talking to my dad and expressing my concerns and he said he wasn’t worried at.all. He said everyone smart was working on it – and therefore it would mostly be resolved.
A lot of people, including people in government, want to see the financial system continue, a lot of effort will be put into keeping the 401K system, which is loved by the nomenklatura, functioning.
SB has clearly taken a big turn, but I’m not there yet. Maybe I’ll be hitting myself in the head saying “how stupid” next year. Maybe not.
I’m with a mega-DoD contractor, so I had to go the max loan route. Good for eye contact with family, and more prep.
Ready on the right . . .