About one-quarter of U.S. adults age 50 and older who are not yet retired say they expect to never retire and 70% are concerned about prices rising faster than their income, an AARP survey finds.
About 1 in 4 have no retirement savings, according to research released Wednesday by the organization that shows how a graying America is worrying more and more about how to make ends meet even as economists and policymakers say the U.S. economy has all but achieved a soft landing after two years of record inflation.
Everyday expenses and housing costs, including rent and mortgage payments, are the biggest reasons why people are unable to save for retirement.
I really think that some time should be given to personal finance in school curriculum.
When I went through, we learned to write a check and balance a checkbook. That was it.
Yeah, schools should be teaching more about financial literacy, but it’s impossible to teach kids about good habits for retirement 40+ years down the road when the laws that govern their retirement haven’t been written yet.
Heck, I’m old enough that my first job out of college actually had a pension plan. I never expected to work long enough there to take advantage of it, though. And I was correct – even if I didn’t leave when I did, the place eventually went bankrupt. Any advice they would have given me in high school about retirement savings would be obsolete now.
The only advice that is eternal is to save money, and live below your means. That seems difficult these days, though, especially for young kids just starting out.
My wife has a pension through her employer, it is going to be her last employer until retirement. Hey at least the golden handcuffs are golden.
More and I are in this exact boat. Want to find something - ANYTHING - else but can’t risk losing that pension. Eggs in one basket and all that.
Makes you wonder why more employers aren’t doing it. Puts employees in the awkward position where they can’t quit because the salary is so high.
My oldest did have to take a personal finance class in high school (last year) and did cover things like retirement saving and different methods of. I think some places are trying.
Edit: I, on the other hand, had your experience.
Doesn’t matter how many classes you take when there’s multiple Financial collapses in your lifetime
I think we need to bring back pensions. There is plenty of money around.
It depends on who is running them. A lot of them aren’t being run well and the federal insurance to protect it is running out of money.
Make that criminally illegal & enforce it & that will stop.
It does but you know so does everything else in life. I think me and you both agree that fire departments should be a thing and I think we both agree that convicted arsonists shouldn’t be running fire departments.
Pensions are a good thing and yes that depends on them being run well. Which really shouldn’t be that hard. Even boring T-Bills and Index funds and land in downtown areas would be fine. I don’t think most people expect their pension fund to return 11% a year.
I guess I am one of the lucky ones. I will be retiring next year with both a pension and social security. I work in county government and that was one of the perks.
Definitely not. While the current situation doesn’t work, neither did pensions. You had to work at one job your whole life, and then were subject to the business decisions of all the sociopathic CEOs throughout your career, as well as whether the corp even survived. I don’t think small companies even had an option. There were some people where this all came together but way too few.
Current IRA and 401k plans have one HUGE benefit: the money is yours. It doesn’t matter whether you change jobs, work for big or small, or the corp goes out of business, the money is yours.
I’m pretty sure more people have some retirement savings now than they did in the days of pensions. Let’s figure out how to turn that into most people having enough savings
What we need is better mandatory contributions to 401Ks. Right now a companies are saving a lot of money compared to pensions by having such low match minimums. Companies also have to auto enroll people, but only at the minimum match level. Lots of pensions required far more commitment that was mandatory.
The money is not yours with an IRA or 401K. It is Goldman’s. They tell you what fund you can invest in and they make it near impossible to roll it into another account and they charge fees for maintenance and for gains.
Sure you on paper own it, but it is really stretching the limits of that word.
My high school had a mandatory senior class that taught things like budgeting, investing, filing (very simple) taxes, and balancing a check book. It also required you to do some form of community service. The investing portion was bad as it was basically stock picking with fun money.
It’s hard to say how much the class impacted me as I don’t have a control, and I then proceeded through four years of college not really exercising those skills. I suspect it’s not a silver bullet, but still a positive inclusion in the curriculum.
These days I’m sure we would see students saying they went SPY 0DTE YOLO because of WSB’s popularity
Managing your finances can only do so much when you barely bring in enough to cover rent.
It definitely isn’t the case that a quarter of the country can’t afford to save anything though their whole working life.
Definitely. I’m a branch manager and we’re putting together a financial training class for our employees because everyone is so bad at budgeting (like non existent to I don’t understand percentages … this is common core at work). School system has completely failed at this and many parents have as well.
I’m not sure it will help in this scenario. This is more of an instant gratification thing. Whether someone has a bit extra or not, you’re asking them to do without, on the hope that it will be more useful in half a century. This is completely against human nature.