Greetings, Next Egg community! Nairuti here, the Next Egg’s new community manager, with some big news. The Next Egg has officially become a project of LIFT Economy! What does that mean for you? That means that you can expect more content, more events, and better support via this platform, as well as more public-facing curated content that you can share with your friends and loved ones about the ins and outs of what we’ve learned along this four-year journey of reimagining retirement.
I wanted to share a little bit about my story, so you can get a sense of who is going to be accompanying you in this shared investigation to reimagine retirement in the United States today…..
My journey to the Next Egg—perhaps not unlike many of you!—has been a winding one. Six years prior to my foray into the working world, my mother secured an H1-B visa sponsorship from an IT firm in the Dulles high-tech corridor right outside of Washington DC. My father and I followed a few months later in June. In September, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers and my parents watched, horrified, as the American Dream disintegrated behind Lady Liberty. It was at that moment that I began to see the extent to which my personal experience (and that of my BIPOC migrant brethren) was being molded by larger forces of empire, labor, and capital.
Across the past decade, this positionality as a Queer, Desi 1.5-gen immigrant woman of color has deeply informed my work and study at the nexus of racial and economic justice in the US and abroad. Most recently, I served as the Director of Research for Beloved Economies, a national narrative change campaign demonstrating the power of transforming work—both as a social institution and practice—as an oft-underutilized lever for greater economic and social change. What I gleaned from this experience was this: regenerative finance was the engine that powered social movements. More importantly, I wanted to be someone who didn't simply oil the machine, but worked to hospice the parts that were no longer serving movement leaders and design and build new ones that were.
Cue LIFT Economy’s Next Economy MBA program (shoutout to Cohort IX!), where I met my now colleague and collaborator, Erin Axelrod, who shared with me that there is $35 trillion locked up in retirement savings in the US today and this community was working to get that money out of Wall Street and into the hands of everyday people like you and me.
The notion of retirement and saving is a contentious one for me—conjuring up a class consciousness littered with guilt, shame, and anger. (I’ll talk more about the intersection of a class analysis and retirement savings in a later post.) Today, my savings look like this:
$4,499.76 in an emergency savings account with PNC Bank;
$7,117.63 in a SEP IRA managed by Fidelity;
$14,365.36 in a Roth IRA managed by Fidelity; and
$34,568.04 in an individual account managed by Fidelity.
The individual account is one I plan on using to fund a part of my sabbatical, support my parents in putting my younger sisters through college (both rising sophomores at public institutions out of state), and, if there is money left over, support myself through graduate school. My partner (who is currently in a PhD program at the University of Notre Dame) and I have thought about marriage and purchasing a home, but both, right now, seem like a far away pipe dream.
I expect to earn approximately $60,000 this year, 15% of which will be taken away to pay self-employment taxes, 22% to pay federal income taxes, and 3.23% to cover Indiana state income taxes. My monthly household expenses are approximately $3,000, leaving me with around $6,000 of savings at the end of the year, all of which I expect to use to help pay for my sisters’ tuition.
To be very blunt, I honestly do not know what kinds of industries and projects I’m investing in with these funds governed by Fidelity. Though some are in an “environmentally sustainable fund”, I’m well aware that those investments include contributions to companies like Microsoft and Tesla.
When a local friend and I initially embarked on a journey to learn more about community investing (shoutout to Michael Shuman—we did so by first reading your book, Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity), I was hopeful. I thought: Great! I’ve got this money and I know of several successful (either cooperatively owned or beloved local institutions) businesses I’d like to invest in, so all I have to do is withdraw my funds and just walk over and hand a check to some business owners, sign some papers guaranteeing a reasonable return, and voilà!
Since then, of course, I’ve learned a lot more—from the classist distinction between accredited and unaccredited investors, the batshit prudent investor rule, to the panic-inducing conundrum of rollovers—and am left buzzing with the following questions about aging, savings, and retirement in America:
How can we embrace a more collectivist, community-of-care approach to aging in the United States?
What might it look like to negotiate my/our needs (e.g. food, water, housing, clothing, transportation) outside a monetary context?
I will becoming much more active when I return from my summer sabbatical September 1st and I look forward to getting to know each of you come September and answer these questions (and many more!) in community. In the meantime…
What questions are alive for you when you consider the landscape of retirement in our country today? How can The Next Egg support you in this journey? What kinds of content/community gatherings/expert advice might you be interested in engaging with this fall?
Until soon, dear Next Egg community. ❤️