ENDE Find your number1 min

Freedom29 Sept 202615 min read

Own your future: why I don’t outsource mine to the state

Hayek, state budgets from Berlin to Rome and why I plan my money as if the state won’t show up. Safety net yes, financial planner no.

Markus Behmann
My future, my job. The view is a bonus.

Responsibility is the good news#

A state that can’t get a train to arrive on time promises you a pension a few decades from now. I’ll pass.

This site isn’t about escaping work, by the way. I like work, and I like getting paid for it. It’s about making work a choice. And about not needing anybody’s permission, or anybody’s pension, to make it.

That starts with one decision: my future is my job. Not my employer’s, not a ministry’s. Most people hear a burden in that. I hear good news, because whoever is responsible also gets to decide.

Hayek in two paragraphs. Fine, five.#

I’m a fan of Friedrich Hayek. In 1945 he published “The Use of Knowledge in Society” in the American Economic Review. His argument: the facts a planner would need never exist in one place. They’re scattered across millions of people, and each of them knows his own circumstances best. Hayek called it a problem of using “knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality”.

In 1974 he turned it into his Nobel lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge”. The title alone is worth the prize. Planners who act as if they had that knowledge do damage. He compared good policy to gardening: you can’t build a plant, you can only provide the conditions in which it grows.

The opposite idea has been in field testing for about a hundred years: planners with all the power and none of the knowledge. The result was a queue every time, and in the worst cases a wall to stop the customers from leaving. People still sell it. Evidence doesn’t bother them.

Now apply that to retirement. Take the German pay-as-you-go pension, because I know it best. It dates from the reform of 1957. It was built for a standard life: one employer, one country, 45 years of contributions. In 1962 six contributors paid for one pensioner. The system has no idea whether you freelance, move abroad, start a company or want to work until 75 because you enjoy it. You know that. Nobody else does.

And before anybody turns Hayek into the patron saint of abolishing everything: he was no enemy of the safety net. In The Road to Serfdom (1944) he argued that a wealthy society can guarantee everyone a minimum of food, shelter and clothing, and that the state may help organize social insurance. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960) he accepted a guaranteed minimum and even compulsory insurance, while criticizing systems run as a state monopoly. My short version: safety net yes, financial planner no.

The arithmetic that makes me sceptical#

Philosophy is nice. Arithmetic is better. I’ll take Germany as the example, because I know it best and its budget papers are public. Your country follows right after.

FigureValueYear
Pension system income from federal subsidies€97.84 billion of €422.59 billion, about 23%2025
Federal payments to the pension system€127.8 billion of €524.5 billion in spending, about 24%2026, budget
Federal interest spending€30.2 billion2026, budget
Federal interest spending€68.1 billion2029, financial plan
Federal interest spending€80.7 billion2030, financial plan

Interest takes about 8% of planned federal tax revenue in 2026 and about 16% in 2029. That’s my calculation, from the government’s own financial plan of August 2026.

If you follow German news, you may have heard that by 2029 all German tax revenue will be eaten by social spending, defence and interest. Great headline. The accurate version is narrower. Veronika Grimm, a member of the German Council of Economic Experts, wrote in a dissenting opinion in the annual report 2025/26 that federal spending on these three blocks is likely to reach about the size of all federal revenue without new debt as early as 2029. That’s one member’s projection for the federal budget, not a finding of the whole council, and it counts defence spending that is financed by debt.

The direction is clear enough for me. When interest doubles, something else has to give, and the pension system gets about a quarter of all federal spending. Guess where the knife goes. I expect pension promises to be cut. When? No idea. I don’t do dates.

Same sum, other capitals#

Not in Germany? Your finance minister has the same spreadsheet, with different numbers in it.

CountryPublic pensions, % of GDP, 2022Projected for 2045Government debt, % of GDP, 2025Interest, % of GDP, 2025People 65+ per 100 aged 20 to 64, 2024 and 2054
Germany10.211.063.51.139.8 and 59.7
France14.413.9115.62.240.2 and 53.4
Italy15.616.5137.13.942.0 and 76.6
Spain13.116.9100.72.434.9 and 76.2
Austria13.714.281.51.634.1 and 61.1
Poland10.210.659.72.533.7 and 67.8
Netherlands6.57.944.40.734.8 and 48.9
EU2711.412.181.71.936.0 and 59.6

The pension columns come from the EU’s 2024 Ageing Report, debt and interest from Eurostat, the ratio from the OECD. Debt and interest cover all levels of government and the social insurance funds together. So don’t compare them with the German federal figures further up.

Now look at Germany in this table. Lowest debt and lowest interest bill of the four big economies. That’s the healthy patient, and I just spent a whole section explaining why I don’t trust his budget. Italy pays 3.9% of GDP in interest. That’s 8% of everything the Italian state collects, by my calculation from Eurostat’s figures.

And the pension projections are the friendly version. Every government calculated them with its own model. The baseline assumes “no policy change”: each reform that’s written into law today stays there for decades, whoever wins the elections in between. It also assumes that productivity in the EU grows by 1.4% a year and that the employment rate climbs from about 75% to about 79%. That’s how France gets a falling line.

I believe the last column. The people who’ll be 65 in 2054 have already been born.

Want your own country next to the rest of Europe? Pick it.

Your country, your numbers

Average earner, full career, state pension only. Source: OECD Pensions at a Glance 2025. Your choice stays in your browser.

Growth will fix it. Sure.#

That’s the standard answer in every capital: growth will fix it. I don’t buy it. Germany is my example again, and it starts with the industry the country is famous for.

Cars#

Measured against all jobs, the car industry looks small. Measured against factory jobs, it doesn’t.

What is countedJobsShare
Car industry itself, plants with 50 or more employees, end of June 2026 (Destatis)691,50013.1% of the 5.29 million manufacturing jobs in such plants
Car makers plus parts suppliers in other industries such as metal, machinery and electrical equipment, 2024 (IW Consult)1.18 millionabout 16% of the 7.4 million people working in manufacturing
All of that plus other upstream suppliers, mostly services, plus dealers, garages and petrol stations, 2024 (IW Consult)3.2 million7.0% of all people in work

The first two shares are my calculations. The third is from the IW Consult study for the federal economics ministry.

So one factory job in eight is in the car industry itself, and about one in six once you add the suppliers that build its parts. After machinery, it’s the second-largest industry in Germany.

And it’s shrinking. 42,300 of the 691,500 jobs disappeared within twelve months, a drop of 5.8%, and Destatis hasn’t counted fewer since 2005. Manufacturing plants of that size lost 144,100 jobs in total. IW Consult adds up the announcements of makers and suppliers to a further 90,000 production jobs by 2030, net.

The share of all jobs is the number for the press conference. The share of factory jobs is the number for the towns that live on them.

AI#

The IMF estimated in January 2024 that about 60% of jobs in advanced economies are exposed to AI. Roughly half of those may be harmed, the other half may become more productive.

I expect AI to cost many jobs. Not everybody agrees, and they brought numbers. The German labour market institute IAB calculated in November 2025 that within 15 years about 1.6 million jobs could vanish or be created, with total employment roughly stable. It even sees AI adding 0.8 percentage points to yearly growth. If the IAB is right, I’m too pessimistic here. I’d be happy to lose that one.

Growth#

Forecast20262027
Germany, GDP (Council of Economic Experts, May 2026)0.5%0.8%
EU, GDP (European Commission, May 2026)1.1%1.4%
Germany, potential growth (Bundesbank, June 2026)0.4%0.3%

Guess first

Potential growth is the speed the economy can sustain in the long run. At 0.3% a year, an economy needs more than 200 years to double. Bring a book. And the Council of Economic Experts expects total social contribution rates to rise from 42.3% of gross pay in 2026 to 49.7% in 2040 under current law.

Budgets that only work with strong growth are a bet. I’d rather not be the stake.

Several things at once#

I don’t think it’ll be one thing. Expensive markets, an industry that’s leaving, debt and interest, an ageing population and AI all show up in the same decade. The market part is in the everything bubble.

Trouble in the factory doesn’t stay in the factory. Parts suppliers, machine builders, the services around the plant and the tax revenue of the town hang on the same orders. In the 36 regions that IW Consult calls especially affected, 14.2% of all jobs depend on cars, twice the national share.

Will it happen? I’m not claiming that. I think it’s more likely than politicians doing what’s necessary to turn the ship around. Doing what’s necessary costs them their job. Doing nothing only costs you.

Why nobody will fix it in time#

Guess first

The numbers first. They’re from Germany’s federal election of 23 February 2025, and the old-age ratios in the table further up tell you where the electorate of your own country is heading:

  • 42.6% of eligible voters were 60 or older, up from 36.3% in 2017. The group aged 30 to 59 came to 44.4%. That leaves 13.0% for everybody under 30.
  • Turnout was 82.5%. It was highest between 50 and 69 at 85.5% and lowest between 21 and 24 at 78.3%.
  • The Federal Returning Officer notes in her own press release that the influence of the generation 60 plus on the result has grown further.

Now the nerdy frame. James M. Buchanan received the economics Nobel in 1986 for public choice theory. In 1979 he gave a lecture in Vienna called “Politics without Romance”. The idea of the field: analyse politicians and voters like everybody else, as people who respond to incentives. Not as selfless guardians of the common good.

Apply that to pensions and subsidies. Whoever cuts them loses the next election, and everybody in parliament can count. The necessary reform is a career-ending move. So it gets postponed until the budget decides instead of the politicians.

Voters under 30, who’ll pay the longest, are 13% of the electorate. Voters aged 60 and over are 42.6%. You don’t need a Nobel Prize to forecast the pension policy.

So don’t wait for the forecast. Check your own gap.

$ pension --reality-check
years
€
€

Open the full check

When the pie shrinks#

Numbers first again, stated as what they are: budget items.

  • Germany’s social budget was €1,431.0 billion in 2025, which is 32% of GDP, according to the preliminary figures of the federal labour ministry.
  • The German federal budget for 2026 holds €28.05 billion for the basic income benefit Bürgergeld, renamed Grundsicherungsgeld in July 2026, plus €13 billion for the federal share of housing and heating costs.
  • In May 2026, 5.21 million people were entitled to this benefit. 2.38 million of them, about 46%, did not have German citizenship. The number of recipients without German citizenship fell by 7.0% within a year.

The state has no money of its own. Every euro it hands out, it took from somebody first, minus a handling fee. So solidarity is easy while the pie grows. The test comes when it shrinks. Then everybody defends their slice: pensioners their pension, workers their net pay, recipients their benefits. Migration into the social systems will be part of that argument, whether anyone likes it or not.

I expect distribution fights, and I expect the tone to get much rougher. People who defend the system today will change their mind quickly when their own pension is cut. History shows how fast political convictions flip when circumstances change.

Social peace isn’t a law of nature. So far it’s been a line in the budget.

I’d rather not depend on how that fight ends. Better to have my own money.

What follows: your own plan#

Now the cheerful part. None of the numbers above decide how you’ll live. Your savings rate, your income and your portfolio do, and you control all three.

  1. Own assets, broadly and cheaply. A global fund, low fees, a standing order. Boring works. The setup is in investing in Europe.
  2. Not only at home. Your job, your pension claims and probably your flat already depend on one country. Your portfolio doesn’t have to, and it doesn’t have to stop at the EU border.
  3. Build income you control. A raise, a side business, a company. Start at Build.
  4. Expect a crash and plan for it. I think markets are expensive, see the everything bubble. That’s a reason for a plan, not for waiting.
  5. Treat the state pension as a bonus. Check what is promised at your pension, then run the stress test in the pension gap check.

Then find the number that makes you financially free. Historical returns are not promises, so play with the assumptions.

Where my own money goes#

What if I’m wrong?#

Then Europe grows, the budgets hold and every state keeps every promise. And you end up with a full pension and a portfolio. Terrible.

That’s a problem you can live with. The other mistake, relying on the promise and being wrong, can’t be repaired at 67.

So no, I’m not a pessimist. The outlook for state budgets is grim. The outlook for people with a plan is fine.

This article is education, not investment, tax or legal advice. It contains my opinion and a disclosure, no product tips.

Sources#

Education, not advice. I don’t know your situation, and past returns promise nothing. Check my numbers, then make your own call. You’re a grown-up.

// keep going

Read next.