The Fantasy of a Comfy Retirement Has Always Been a Mirage

On Thursday, a woman named Sharon from Minnesota called into C-SPAN’s “open forum” to express her despair about the cost of living. “I’m 65 years old. I’m legally blind. I’m on disability. I went to my doc, and I lost 28 pounds in the last year. I did not need to lose 28 pounds. I did not try to lose 28 pounds. I lost the 28 pounds because I cannot afford to eat anymore,” Sharon explained, speaking clearly even though she sounded near tears. Because of Trump administration cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the high cost of groceries, gas and electricity, Sharon only allows herself $65 a month for food.

Sharon is at the age when many Americans hope to be comfortably retired, yet her situation — struggling to afford basics, reliant on dwindling government support that doesn’t make ends meet — is one that many of my younger readers fear is in their future. The oldest members of Gen X are approaching 65, and their financial situation — the amount of savings they currently have, when they expect to start collecting Social Security — may be worse than that of their Boomer counterparts. The future feels even grimmer for Americans in their 20s, 30s and 40s who are struggling to pay down college debt and afford child care to the extent that saving for retirement may feel ridiculous.

When I interviewed members of Gen Z last year about how they pictured aging in the United States, their mood was especially dour. They worried about the cost of living continuing to rise in America for themselves and their older relatives. A 20-something reader named Christian Avalos told me he doesn’t believe he’ll be able retire in this country, he’s already concerned for his Gen X parents, and anyway, he’s hoping “global warming or water wars will take me out by then.” Another reader wrote a long, exasperated “hahahaha,” noting how inflation has outpaced wages for decades, and added: “Can you honestly tell me there will ever come a time in my life where I won’t need some form of regular income to feel secure?”

Younger Americans are not crazy to fear a future where they may struggle in their old age. While it’s too early to measure Gen X’s retirement rate, in February, the National Institute on Retirement Security, a nonpartisan research organization, put out a report on retirement preparedness among Americans, which showed that the median worker has only $955 saved in defined-contribution retirement accounts. A D.C. account, such as a 401(k) or I.R.A, is typically funded by employees’ pretax dollars that employers sometimes match. According to an AARP survey from 2024, 1 in 5 Americans over 50 has no retirement savings at all, and 37 percent “are worried about covering basic expenses, such as food and housing.”

The National Institute on Retirement Security’s report includes workers ages 21 to 64, nearly half of whom do not have a D.C. plan through their main employer. As of 2022, only 17 percent of workers had access to a defined benefit plan, such as a traditional pension. N.I.R.S. describes the three-legged stool of retirement income as the combination of a pension, a D.C. plan and Social Security. “The bottom line is that if Americans are not saving for retirement through their employer, then they are probably not saving at all,” N.I.R.S.’s report, written by Tyler Bond and Joelle Saad-Lessler, explains.

In plain language: Americans who are already living paycheck to paycheck don’t have the extra money to put away for retirement, and even if they did, they don’t have access to employer-sponsored retirement accounts where they could park that money.

It really is an open question whether the majority of Americans can attain the dream of a comfortable retirement, covered in grandchildren, without financial stress. But for Gen X and generations below, two long-term trends are especially worrying. One is the loss of pensions, which historically have provided a much more certain retirement nest egg than defined-contribution accounts alone, because the latter are subject to market fluctuations. Older Boomers were much more likely to have pensions, which started to be phased out in the early 80s, and the current crop of workers is unfortunately subject to the decimation of the federal work force, which was once a reliable source of job security with a pension at the end of the road.

The other trend is the increasing cost of housing, which is a growing problem for seniors and isn’t showing signs of abating. According to a 2025 report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, over a third of older households paid “more than 30 percent of their income for housing.”

If all of this makes you want to plug your ears and pretend it’s not happening, I don’t blame you, because that’s generally my response to depressing financial news. But I asked Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist and columnist at Bloomberg, about the N.I.R.S. report and whether younger generations will ever be able to retire, and she made me a bit more hopeful that policy improvements are possible.

“If there’s one thing you should drive home, it’s that the key to retirement security is auto-enrollment,” Edwards said. 401(k)s have been a relatively successful retirement vehicle for the people who have access to them because it’s easy to opt in, she explained. This is why the plan that President Trump outlined in his State of the Union address last week is a genuinely good one.

Trump, taking a page from a proposal that President Obama floated in his second term, said that as of next year, he would give workers who did not have an employer-sponsored retirement plan access to the plan that federal workers have. Edwards said this will be a win, as long as Trump actually creates a plan for every worker, auto-enrolls them and ensures that the plan has a few investment options that are safe and managed.

I also asked Edwards about the future solvency of Social Security, which is keeping 17 million older Americans out of poverty right now, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Edwards said she’s only a little worried about the future of Social Security, because it is so incredibly popular, the program has never missed a promised benefit, and sophisticated surveys show that Americans are willing to pay more in taxes rather than cut their future benefits. However, if Social Security benefits become income-restricted, she explained, that could be genuinely devastating to the financial health of most seniors.

The potential for means testing gives me pause, as does Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s rumblings about privatizing Social Security. The Trump administration has shown time and again that it prefers to offload financial risk onto citizens.

In a country as wealthy as ours is, a woman like Sharon should not have to be calling into C-SPAN, choking up on air, explaining why she can no longer afford to eat. We are abandoning too many vulnerable Americans, and I don’t see the broader picture improving soon.

End Notes

The news is so horrifying. While we should all know what’s going on, our brains need a break, too. I am currently disassociating by watching videos of cats and people falling. Let me help you fix your algorithm. I also cook. A lot. It’s somehow shocking that my family needs to eat dinner every single day, and yet I persevere. I made tomato basil chicken breasts from NYT Cooking this weekend with pasta and broccoli on the side and everybody ate it and no one complained.
Remember a few weeks ago when the Department of Education told me that its efforts with America 250 and the History Rocks! Tour were completely nonpartisan? From The Washington Post, March 2: “A banner featuring the image of the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was seen at the Department of Education building in Washington, D.C., alongside images of Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., Anne Sullivan, Booker T. Washington and Catharine Beecher.”

Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.