Many Americans have no retirement savings - Article

[Deleted]

Ugh. Posts like this and yesterday's post about caring for grandparents and parents with no savings freak me out (and scare me to aggressively save for my own retirement).

My mom is single again, has no money, and has no "plans " other than to find another man to take care of her. She terrifies me.

[raangoli]

How do you "never plan to retire"? Where on earth does a 60 or 70 - something year old get a job? Unless you don't plan on living long, this makes no sense to me.

[ddi741]

I have friends who just say "Well I'll work forever" whenever we discuss retirement. It makes me nervous for them.

[dottyblue]

I am so thankful that my parents have saved for retirement. They never had much money, but my father always stashed something away. They won't be rolling in it when they retire, but at least I know I won't have to support them. I just may need to help them budget a little and stretch their $$.

I work in payroll for a large company. It's sad to see how many people (more than 50% of the company) don't use the retirement planning AT ALL from year-to-year.

[leeba25]

May 28, 2015 10:15:27 GMT -5 scm1011 said:

May 28, 2015 10:11:00 GMT -5 raangoli said:

How do you "never plan to retire"? Where on earth does a 60 or 70 - something year old get a job? Unless you don't plan on living long, this makes no sense to me.

My 68 year old mother has $0 in retirement and works for near minimum wage at a homeless shelter (a fairly physically demanding job). Coupled with her meager social security, this is her indefinite plan. She stresses me out.

My mom is in an amazingly similar situation. She's 72 and works as a home health aide to disabled adults. She wants to move to a different part of the country (to be closer to me & my brother) but she can't because she doubts she'd be able to find a job. My main feeling about her is exactly what you said, she stresses me out. And she's always all, "oh jesus will take care of me!" or "i'll be fine, it'll work out." She is the reason that I save so aggressively for retirement. 

[WinterWine]

I often see older people that are of "retirement age" in my mind working as cashiers or baggers in the grocery store. It makes me so sad that they have to continue to do that.

That combined with my mom's horrible money management definitely encourage me to heavily invest for retirement.

[mrshandy]

This is definitely my MIL and probably FIL.

MIL lives paycheck to paycheck. She should own her home eventually and is pretty self sufficient. She lives in Maine where she has lots of family so that gives me some hope she won't be a burden on us someday. She has little to no financial sense. I don't really blame her since she grew up very poor around people with no financial sense. Married at 19 to FIL who controlled the finances. Divorced at 40 or so. I hope she is putting something away for retirement, but I'm scared to ask.

FIL will probably work until he dies. He should get some inheritance from GMIL.

My parents are pretty good with money so I'm not too worried about them.

[raangoli]

May 28, 2015 10:15:27 GMT -5 scm1011 said:

May 28, 2015 10:11:00 GMT -5 raangoli said:

How do you "never plan to retire"? Where on earth does a 60 or 70 - something year old get a job? Unless you don't plan on living long, this makes no sense to me.

My 68 year old mother has $0 in retirement and works for near minimum wage at a homeless shelter (a fairly physically demanding job). Coupled with her meager social security, this is her indefinite plan. She stresses me out.

I am stressed out for you! And I agree with @songforyou that health is rarely taken into consideration when planning for the future. That adds another level of complexity. 

[crashgizmo]

I think the scary part to me as well, is that the article said 1/4 of adults over 45 have no retirement savings. I think there is another large percentage who have $30K and think that's enough. My 65 year old single aunt was telling me the other week how she had $80K saved in retirement, so she was in great shape and was excited to retire soon!

[irene adler]

I have a feeling I'll be working forever. I am saving as aggressively as I can, between all the setbacks in the last two years it just feels like retirement is the impossible dream.

[ssmjlm]

MIL has no retirement because she never really worked full time for a long enough period. They basically live off her 2nd husbands pension and whatever SS they get.

I'm always amazed to find out how little people are saving for retirement. It's not just those with none, but those that won't realize they don't have enough until it may be too late.

[v]

May 28, 2015 10:11:00 GMT -5 raangoli said:

How do you "never plan to retire"? Where on earth does a 60 or 70 - something year old get a job? Unless you don't plan on living long, this makes no sense to me.

I would imagine they don't plan to retire because they don't have the luxury to plan to retire.  Sure, it is hard to get a job at 60/70 and many people will have advanced years in which they are entirely unfit to work -- but if you never had extra money lying around to put into a retirement account, etc., what are you supposed to do?

[simpsongal]

Ugh, I fear for the future of the Baby Boomers.

They (the government?) really need to do more to encourage automatic retirement contributions. People barely miss that 3% or more when it disappears from their check. But ask someone to actively set aside money? NEWP.

[shell403b]

I bitch A LOT A LOT (internally, esp. when H gets bonuses and 1/2 of it is gone right off the top) about how much money H and I are throwing into our retirement accounts, b/c apparently I must think that money grows on trees for retirement?

I read threads like this one and remember exactly why we throw so much money at our RT accounts and don't want to rage out as bad.

[imojoebunny]

May 28, 2015 10:11:00 GMT -5 raangoli said:

How do you "never plan to retire"? Where on earth does a 60 or 70 - something year old get a job? Unless you don't plan on living long, this makes no sense to me.

I have a 74 year old friend who works at Kroger, and will until she cannot get out of bed.  She is far from alone.  

[crashgizmo]

I have 19 employees who work for me who are under 26. Even though most of them make peanuts, you better believe I have a message I deliver about contributing to retirement. So many of them don't realize that $50 from your check isn't even $50 less, and what compounding interest can do. I like to believe at least 1/2 of them listen to me.

[raangoli]

Since I've been quoted often, I wanted to come back and say that yes, I realize that saving for retirement is a luxury that not many people can afford. Literally. When I said it makes no sense, I was thinking in terms of feasibility of working into your 70s, 80s, and beyond from a physical and mental standpoint (not to mention the lack of gainful employment that may be available).

Bottom line, I think the system is broken. How can you save for retirement if you can barely eek out a living while you are young?

[hurricanedrunk]

]Still, the finances of many families are shaky. Only 53 percent of respondents said they could cover a hypothetical emergency expense costing $400 without selling something or borrowing money.


The retirement numbers are pretty scary but for some reason the above stat really stuck out to me.

[niq]

PDQ

IF (and this is a very big IF) you can sort out housing, health care, and car expenses, it doesn't take that much money to live. For the last several years of her life grandmother was living off nothing but SS checks -- about $1300/month in today's dollars. But as far as anyone knew she was doing just fine. They even had cable! She had a paid-off house, a paid-off car ... I don't think she had any access to health care other than Medicare. She didn't travel anywhere, and she didn't buy her children or grand children $200 Christmas gifts, but otherwise her life was perfectly normal.

Mom has Medicaid and lives with us. She gets $970/month in SS retirement benefits. She runs a small surplus every month. Obviously by living with us she has some other expenses (utilities) that we are footing, but on the other hand she also does grocery shopping that we end up eating. She buys little things for the house or for babyniq. The knicknack shopping pisses me off, but that's just as much about clutter as it is about money.

Dealing with a short term financial crunch -- the big one is usually car related, but there can be other things that come up -- is obviously a problem when your income is this low. But it's possible to arrange your life so that you don't need that much money.

[Deleted]

niq "They even had cable!" LOL.

[msmerymac]

I dunno. It's hard, man. We make 2-3x the national average for HHI and I definitely find it hard to max retirement. Just now we're barely at 15%, because of stupid choices, being in grad school forever, etc, which isn't close to what we COULD be doing. Or should be doing, given our ages. I hope to max out in 2 years, but I feel like I'll be playing catch-up.

And I DID put 5% in when I got my first job with a 401k, when I was 22. There were just a lot of years I neglected that, and I've pretty much never worked anywhere where I got a 401k match.

I can see how even for middle-high earners, it's easy to not think about it until you're 40 or 50. My former boss (who was in his 30s at the time) said something like, "Oh yeah, I have to start doing that," when I asked about when I could start contributing to the 401k (I think it was 1 year after I started). This was a guy who made 6 figures, was married, drove a nice car, the works.