If you’re like many middle class Millennials then you’ve likely resigned yourself to never being able to retire. It’s a running joke amongst people entering middle-age that their retirement age is death. Meaning they’ve accepted that they’ll likely work until they die of old age because there’s no way they’ll be able to put away enough money in the next 20 plus years to be able to retire.
This isn’t even just a Millennial issue, it’s simply more wide spread for this particular generation as wages stagnate while the cost of existing continues to skyrocket. But we’ve seen adolescents open up GoFundMe pages for elderly workers at their local Walmart or McDonald’s who were well past the age of retirement trying to make ends meet.
Millennials have been told since they were in middle school that social security would likely not be around when they were old enough to retire. But how did it come to this and exactly how much do you need in order to retire?
Vox conducted an interview with a couple of financial experts and people who would be considered middle class. The video opens up with Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist, that gives some staggering figures if you’re one of those Americans already feeling behind on retirement.
“If you want to maintain your living standards that you have now or you’ll have throughout your life, in the American system by the time you’re 30 you should have about one times your current salary. By the time you’re 40 you should have about two and a half or three times your salary. In your 60s you should have eight to ten times your annual salary,” Ghilarducci reveals to Vox.
Those numbers seem unrealistic, even to the expert interviewed when looking at today’s economy. She later explains why retirement is becoming an unachievable dream for many working Americans.
“The reason why a coal miner and a lawyer could expect to retire is because of the design of our pension system, which we don’t have anymore. Your employer would put money aside for your retirement and that money couldn’t be accessed by you. So the dollar that the employer put in on your behalf was put into a big pool of money and it was professionally invested and at the end of your working life, that money would be translated into a lifetime benefit.”
According to both of the financial experts interviewed, the laws changed about 40 years ago switching things over to more of the system we recognize today. The entire video is extremely eye opening. Check it out below.