Uh, that is quite a pessimistic take from someone debating on HN, which is a forum of IT-related professionals. Maybe your level of required confidence is too high.
Vast majority of old people in the developed world do not end up homeless and IT professionals are even better off than an average Western employee. So "assuming no major surprises or threats..." and assuming you are not at risk of becoming alcoholic or drug dependent, you do not really need to fear homelessness.
By "a lot of assets" I mostly mean "a house", but a decent size pension would count instead. Both are out of reach for many people now.
I agree that most old people in the developed world don't end up homeless.
On the other hand, there's a growing economic housing crisis affecting a lot of people in almost every developed country. Mostly affecting (current) younger people, and most (current) older people are almost oblivious to it. It's working its way up the age range. This is new.
You cannot assume what worked will always work, when there are factors that appear to be changing across generations.
Many people are paying >50% of their income in rent, and rents are still rising in most places faster than incomes. Most renters cannot find a way to get on the house buying ladder. If things carry on as they are, many people currently young will retire while renting. If you're paying 50% income on rent now, what are you going to do at pension time, as pensions are typically 1/3 or less of the income prior to retirement. You'll have to carry on working, but that gets harder with age, faster for some people than others.
I agree with you most will probably not end up homeless, but the point is, for that to work out, something will have to change.
I personally know an IT person who reached retirement age and is dependent on state benefits to pay their ongoing rent, and found those state benefits enough for almost zero properties in the area they lived for decades prior, making it hard to find a place from which to continue looking after their own older parents. They struggle, and have to work on the side.
And another, skilled and knowledgable software engineer, currently paid well, who for a period last year was unable to pay for rent or food due to running out of money and access to credit. They needed help from local volunteers just to eat. How can that happen, you may think? This is HN, where not everyone is working for a company. Like many HN readers who are entrepreneurial (it's notionally a startup forum), they were a business bootstrapper, and it's easy for that to become financially precarious when things don't go so well. Add a badly timed pandemic into the mix, government support for everyone except small business owners, and a time where jobs were not proving easy to get, and you have a recipe where homelessness really was realistic for a skilled IT person and, unfortunately, their family. I'm sure they're not the only one around here who's had to seriously face it last year.
My own pension is projected to be less than my current rent, which is already low for the area, so I think it's rational to be thinking about that.
Ironically, as climate change effects become more and more prominent, going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes.
That's fine when young and healthy, but when you're older, have several recurring doctor appointments and some mild impairments, a home is a lot better.
Not saying it can't be done, after all there are nomad populations with elderly people who live on the road. But they usually have a support system that travels along, too.
what's the plan when fuel shortages start happening and your RV can't be kept rolling?
It is not unreasonable to work under the assumption that temporary petrol shortages become a annual or semi-annual event in a future where the gulf coast is hammered with ever more frequent and powerful hurricanes.
This is an area where small, distributed solar panel arrays and batteries (like on your house) can be much more robust. It's a lot harder to destroy thousands of small solar power systems than it is to take out a pipeline feeding an entire city.
Also, with a bigger battery comes higher limits on how fast you can charge. If you have a 300kWh battery you should be able to charge it at 300kW all day long.
That said, it doesn't really exist since there is no market for it at the moment. RV sales aren't exactly high, so the niche for EV RVs is even smaller. Plus there's no real infrastructure out for it now.
I suspect once EV Semis become more mainstream we'll see that trickle down to RV users. They can charge at the same place a semi would charge at.
Also, there will undoubtably be hybrid options where you can have a multi fuel generator charging your batteries.
https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/f150-lightning/2022/#towing...
But realistically, hybrid powertrains, or even simple multi-fuel generator charging will make this a non issue.
Provided you're lucky enough to run out of gas in a location that your RV won't be a nuisance. And if you're in hurricane territory, an RV is not functionally equivalent to a house.
These days, it takes a lot of assets to be confident you won't be homeless in old age assuming no major surprises or threats from society and the environment changing.
I would say most younger people don't earn enough or have enough assets to reach that level of basic confidence. After all, if you've rented all your life so far due to inability to buy a place to live, you probably know, in the back of your mind, that when you retire, you can't see any way to pay the rent unless something changes between now and then.
No need for any catastrophic surprises. That's foreseeable.