Why Most Americans Won’t Retire Well

Why Most Americans Won’t Retire Well

With Americans taking out loans for most of life’s big-dollar purchases because prices have inflated along with government printing of money, they don’t save enough for old age. ...
Charles Scaliger

Most Americans live and work with the expectation that, sometime between their 65th and 70th birthday, they will be able to retire from their workaday activities and spend their golden years enjoying grandchildren, traveling or other forms of recreation, or doing volunteer service such as missionary work that the demands of a career and growing family once precluded. Although a comparatively recent by-product of modern prosperity, retirement — like medical care and education — has come to be widely viewed as an essential component of the lifestyle of comfort and diversion to which several generations of modern Americans have become accustomed.

Yet the rite of retirement, for millions of Americans, is less reality than pipe dream. Every day, younger Americans shopping for groceries, eating out at family restaurants, or taking their children to school interact with elderly men and women running cash registers, waiting tables, driving commercial trucks and buses, teaching classes, and doing myriad other types of full-time work. To those of us who remember our grandparents as the people who always had time and means to entertain their grandchildren, because full-time careers and other concerns of youth and middle age were finished, this can seem jarring. And while some working senior citizens may do so out of a desire to keep busy and be productive, a majority continue working because they are financially unable to retire.

Although America continues to pro­gress technologically and economically, the decrease in the percentage of senior citizens able to retire is a troubling indicator of a larger trend — that today’s rising generation can expect to be less well-off than their parents and grandparents, with many of the elements of the traditional American dream — such as a well-earned retirement — becoming relics of the past.

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