Millennial here - gen Z has retirement savings???
lol right? Must be nice to afford to put more than your employer’s match into your 401k
What the hell is an employer match?
- Millennials, probably
As far as I understand, I don’t have a 401k. I have nothing. I have never considered retirement to be a reasonable outcome for anyone in my generation or younger, but even still, it’s not like I would have been able to save more than a scant couple thousand after decades of work.
for anyone in my generation or younger
You think no adults entering the workforce in the last ~20 years if going to be able to retire? What little bubble are you living in?
The bubble where the entire concept of retirement will be lost. Where society will crumble into wearing tribes fighting over arable land and fresh water. That one. That bubble. The bubble where this will begin in earnest in our lifetime. The bubble that says this fascist wave around the world is just the precursor and that as people get more desperate, things will only get worse.
Also you have to watch out for those expense ratios. I once worked at an employer where the only funds available in the 401k plan had expenses and fees around 2%. Managed mutual funds statistically perform no better than just cheap index funds. So paying those fees doesn’t actually earn you a higher rate of return. But plans with usurious fees are cheaper for employers to provide.
What was so egregious about it is that when I ran the numbers, I found that my employer’s 401k plan was actually worse than investing in cheap index funds in a regular taxable brokerage account. The 401k could be contributed to with pre-tax money, but all the tax benefits were cancelled out by being trapped in high expense 401k plans.
I contributed enough to get the match and invested any money above that elsewhere.
Have you looked into the high yield accounts from Marcus (Goldman Sachs). if you have any money Sitting around in a checking account or even Another savings account but you don’t need immediately you should consider this. The APY is 3.65%, which is a lot better than anything a regular bank will do. And you can transfer money between them with their app. of course they also offer no penalty CDs and standard CDs
Not if they’re dipping into it at 30. That’s going to kill any kind of compound interest.
I’m about to be 29, and have literally zero savings to speak of. I’ve been paycheck-to-paycheck pretty much my entire working life.
If it’s any consolation it took me until I hit 33 for me to have any savings at all.
Anything I put into the account I used for savings went out the same month so I didn’t go into an overdraft.
Funny enough the only thing that changed is I passed my qualifications and got my first “real” job… Though I may have also spent the past 8 or 9 years isolated in a way that regular people only got to see during the 'rona times
The best investment at your age is in training/education to improve your take home pay or ability to relocate. Fuck retirement savings, you have to eat for 30+ years to get there first. Invest in yourself, not in the fucking casino controlled by billionaires that is the stock market.
My wife made a career swap 5 years ago after getting a master’s degree. We used our retirement savings to pay for the schooling because the ROI was under 1 year.
Ah yes, telling the person that just admitted they’re paycheck-to-paycheck to pay for education, perfect.
Training isn’t a bad option, though, especially since some jobs will pay you for it. Some trades do paid apprenticeships - the pay isn’t great, but it’s better than paying for training.
Alternately, manufacturing jobs can be pretty good. I had a friend who got a job working in a factory right out of high school - he started at $20/hour, with a sizeable raise after the first year.
The only way off the hamster wheel of paycheck to paycheck living is to find a way to make the paycheck larger. The entire system is designed prevent you from doing so of course. You can not save money out of poverty wages.
It’s counter-intuitive but financially going $10K into credit card debt just to survive, while paying $10K for targeted education/training from disbursed 401K funds is a better use of the money. You can increase your pay by $20-30k or more per year with marketable training/education. If you pay off the credit card it will just come back if you don’t increase your wages. Bankruptcy also can’t take away the education/skills you’ve gained.
Swapping jobs frequently for a higher paycheck is required today. Every 1-2 years in your 20’s as you fight the experience/poverty wages bullshit. Every 3-5 after that just to beat inflation. When you swap jobs the 401k becomes available for withdrawal. Instead of using it to pay down debts etc., pay for education/training to make the next job pay more. Usually signing up for the minimum amount of the 401K makes almost no difference to your take home pay but a nice little bit of cash at each job change.
“the system is designed to prevent you from saving your way out of poverty” Followed immediately by “go 10,000 into credit card debt to pay for education”
While “Bankruptcy can’t take away your skills” it can 100% leave you on the street.
Not really, but that’s a myth that credit card companies want you to believe. Creditors really want to be repayed and make a profit. So they want you working, eating top ramen and paying them back. Homeless & jobless = no money for them.
Property owners want somebody with a job, a history of paying rent, and enough income to cover it. I was always able to get a place to live even when my credit rating was sub-500’s due to credit card charge-offs.
Millennial here- I’m bout to not have retirement savings.
It’ll be the best avocado toast ever though, right?
Until this year, the job market was surprisingly good for Gen Z.
I had 14 grand in a 401k. I had to spend it to survive for a year while I looked for a job. All of it.
Now I know 14k aint shit. But that is where we are.
14k would have been $132k in 45 years when you would have otherwise retired.
The power is in the interest. Even if you max out your 401k in the future it cannot make up for missing interest earnings on early deposits. Having to use it it now means nobody in this entire generation will ever retire, ever.
Another thing to consider is that 45 years of inflation and probable economic issues will likely lower that return, possibly lower than today’s purchasing value.
Plus people need the money in the first place, meaning those who need the money the most have the least. So either way it’s a bad deal for funding retirement beyond some extra spending money for people who had money to begin with.
It’s the opposite actually. The stock market has historically returned an average of about 7%/year after inflation. $14k invested at 7% per year is worth about $327k after 45 years. And that 7% is again, an average rate, so a balancing of the crashes vs. the rallies, and it’s after inflation.
I would really rather just have a pension.
But that’s too much to ask.
Eh. I’ve done pretty well with the 401k system. Pensions often just seem like a way for employers to pull a bait-and-switch. Need to work for 30 years at a company for a full pension? They get you to accept a lower wage on that promise, then you get fired at year 29. Or a company recruits a bunch of young workers on a promise of a pension decades down the line. Decades later, when they’re about to face a massive surge in those on the company pension rolls, the company mysteriously goes bankrupt. The company owners looted the company, wracked it up with debt, and let it go bankrupt before the pension bill came due, and left the workers holding the bag.
The nice thing about 401ks is that employers can’t screw you over after the fact. I don’t trust companies to be able to deliver on promises decades from now. With a 401k, they give all they’re ever going to give up front, and you can make an informed decision over whether you’re being fairly compensated. It’s hard to judge the fair value of a pension that may or may not disappear before you’re eligible to collect it decades from now. Oh, and employers only retain control over your 401k funds for as long as you work there. After that, you transfer them to an IRA account that is completely under your control.
My partner and I are in our late 30s and have made regular contributions to 401ks and IRAs. At this point, our retirement is fully funded. By this I mean we could choose to never make another contribution, and if we just let our investments sit and grow, we would be able to comfortably retire at age 65. We’re still making investments, but only to move forward the date we’re able to retire.
Yes, it requires some discipline and you have to educate yourself. You need to learn about things like investment ratios, index funds, etc. But ultimately it isn’t that complicated as people like to pretend it is. And you have to have the discipline to not panic sell when the market drops. It’s a bit different if people have to cash out for a financial emergency. But many make really stupid mistakes such as selling during a downturn, trying to time the market, instead of just buying and holding cheap index funds until retirement.
But yeah, we’ve done pretty well. At this point, barring some catastrophic life-altering scenarios, our retirement is assured. We don’t have to worry about an employer pulling the rug out from under us. We don’t have to worry about a company going bankrupt. We don’t have to worry about being fired shortly before reaching reaching the number of years needed for a full pension. We don’t have to stay at a job earning below-market wages for years just for the pension. We don’t even have to work some arbitrary number of years; we can retire as soon as our assets are enough to provide for whatever lifestyle we’re comfortable with.
And if you’re just worried about running out of money in retirement? You can always invest in the stock market and then buy annuities once you reach retirement age.
Pensions have their place. But I think we tend to look at them with rose-tinted glasses. Companies bankrupting their way out of pension responsibilities was an infamous thing not too long ago.
And then one major medical emergency happens… poof!
Just to put it into perspective, if the inflation rate for the past 45 years predicts the next 45 years. $14K today = $55K in 45 years. A $75K household income today would be $294K in 45 years.
So $14K in a 401K saved for 45 years is a pittance and should never be considered a retirement “program”. It’s all bullshit to decrease and eliminate the cost of actual pension programs.
You don’t just put $14k into a 401k, you keep contributing to it. Getting more and more money to compound upon itself.
If you put $4k into it every year (remember, this is pre-tax money and often has an employer match), and it grows 8% per year on average (S&P 500 actually does more like 10%, but we will be more conservative and say 8%), we will also be conservative and assume you won’t increase contributions, even as you earn more later in life, then you have $1,546,022 after 45 years of working.
Yes, this is something you can retire on.
Gotta include inflation in there.
$1,546,022 in 45 years with the same inflation we’ve had for the past 45 years would only be worth $529,400 in todays money.
If you only plan on living for 10 years or less after retiring, then, Maybe.
You only get the 401k when you retire in US? This is not in addition to normal Social Security?
Most of us that are younger than the Boomers or maybe Gen X don’t want to count on Social Security because we’ve been hearing our whole lives that Social Security is on the chopping block because the government is in so much debt. And at this point we kinda just expect that ladder to be pulled up behind the Boomers before we get anything, because that’s already happened in so many other areas like home ownership.
I also think people need to remember that Social Security is their own money that they paid in over their lives, and they are owed it back.
And also that even though the US government has a large amount of debt, we’ve also spent the last 50 years giving tax cuts to the rich, we’d probably be just fine if we went back to a 90% marginal tax rate on the top earners like we had in the “good old days” of the 1950s.
Most of us that are younger than the Boomers or maybe Gen X don’t want to count on Social Security because we’ve been hearing our whole lives that Social Security is on the chopping block because the government is in so much debt.
Thinking about it, the chance that Social Security money will be stolen and transferred to the 1% is quite high. Not because of the debt but simply to make the rich even richer. They will probably just say that the current system is not sustainable and move all the money into pension funds controlled by private banks which will then gamble with it pocketing the profits and socializing the loses. But 401k is the same so putting money there is not really a solution. The solution is to run away but obviously not everyone is able to.
And $132K in 45 years will buy you 1 Happy Meal. ;)
I had $20K a 401K and $15K in school loans when I swapped jobs in my late 20’s. Guess what I did with it.
3 years later I was able to purchase my first house because I saved up money instead of paying the student loans.
Right now I should be maximizing my retirement savings according to all the advisors. Instead I am using the money to pay for my kids college so they can start off in life above zero instead of -$50k like my wife and I did.
I figured out a long time ago that there is no way in hell I can retire and remain in the U.S. The system is rigged against me. So my goal for the next 10 years is to learn Spanish.
14k is worth 14k, and you can live a very spartan year on it apparently.
Probably worth a lot less after early withdrawal penalties and taxes.
Yep. Was 18k originally.
Gen X here, same fucking story.
Yeah what I said last time I saw this article.
Hey, you are responsible for MAGA. Be responsible and do what your forefathers did.
The survey this is based on has a summary page, but they don’t post their survey error estimates. What I can tell, without giving them my email, is that the entire survey was 250 adults. How many of those are “gen z” I have no idea, but if you are generous and say 1/4 that is 63 people considered gen z. The 46 percent that reported dipping into savings would then be about 29.
Just so everyone prognosticating about the state of the economy in this thread is aware, you are commenting on a survey that has a very low n and did not publish any sort of margin of error.
Have you actually read the other comments? Because the majority from what I can see are talking about their OWN experiences, and agreeing with the findings. I myself have done all three things in the headline in the past year.
I also noticed that the dichotomy is “luxury spending” vs. “paying off debt”, but that debt could easily have come from prior ‘luxury spending’, lol.
The source cited in this article is a website that’s shilling products, no methodology available at all, that I can see.
Valid
Yeah, because everything is ridiculously expensive and no one makes any money.
You got to love that media outlet. They can’t even write an accurate headline. If people are skipping meals, they aren’t getting by.
Billionaires have all our money. Maybe we could ask for it back nicely.
Guillotine is nice.
Yes.
But: people still want to be billionaires, what if they became billionaires themselves after coming up with a new invention?
People would need to stop using their social media, software, webstores etc.
Millennials be like…
It’s amazing how badly small amount of people can treat large amount of people and get away with it.
Gen Z has retirements? 🤔
BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL :\
And it’s only going to be more beautiful once people are dropping dead due to medicaid and RFK Jr.
I had to cash out my 401(k) while looking for a job. Thought I was on the start to a good track, but the house of cards collapses easily.
Sending applications that make you enter the information multiple times, have some ATS system with poorly implemented OCR autofilling among other issues. The chance to even have a chance at a job via interview is ridiculous.
To add insult to injury, at my previous job most people were referred by relatives or hired a VERY long time ago. It seems the world just hates anyone under 40? Including those damned millennials, right??
It’s fun to be expected to break your back for a system when nothing rewards you.
Millennial but I’ve been doing this for the last 4-5 years at this point
Im Xer and my wife is to. We are doing that now to some degree. We were actually sorta trying to dejunk but now we are scared we might need something and not have the money to buy it so not getting rid of stuff as much.
I’m currently downsizing homes, and while staying with family, doing the one thing I swore I would never do, paying for storage.
When we find our next place we won’t be able to afford to refurnish if we sold all the furniture. I feel you.
Soon there will be a critical mass of people who have nothing left to lose
