As many of us know, the Next Egg is founded on the assumption that people have retirement savings to move out of Wall Street. Unfortunately, for many of us in the United States today, that is simply not true, particularly along the lines of class and race. Several of you on this very platform have shared your lack of retirement savings—and the reasoning ranges from unlivable wages, a lack of generational wealth on which to fall back, unstable or unreliable employment, needing to pay for health crises or the ever-increasing costs of higher education, to structural racism.
Consider the following questions:
How are the ways in which individuals can begin saving for retirement in the first place?
What are the mechanisms by which one saves for retirement? Who has had access to them? For how long? Who hasn’t (and, more importantly, why not and for how long)?
Who has the ability to save? And, more importantly, who doesn’t?
What information related to personal finance, budgeting, and retirement savings is available? To whom? To whom is it not?
For those who are able to save and self-direct their investments, where does power lie?
The data paint a bleak picture.
Only about 50% of households in the United States report any savings in retirement accounts (Hoffman et al., 2022).
¼ of Americans have no retirement savings at all (Hoffman et al., 2022).
About 54% white people own a (or multiple) retirement account(s), while only about 37% of Black folks own at least one retirement account (Hoffman et al., 2022).
Retirement account ownership rates are lowest among Latinx communities at a measly 28.3% (Hoffman et al., 2022).
Thirty-four percent of Hispanic families and 45% of Black families have individual or employee-sponsored retirement accounts, compared to 60% of white families (Hoffman et al., 2022).
Forty-eight percent of workers believe they don’t make enough money to adequately save for retirement (Borwick, 2023).
More than nine million workers over the age of 65 are still in the labor force, either actively working or seeking work (Martin, 2014).
Fifty percent of individuals between ages 55 and 62 don’t have the resources to pay for basic retirement needs or uninsured medical expenses (Yoshikane, 2011).
Some states don’t make public information about which financial firms are managing that state’s residents’ pensions (Sirota, 2014).
In 2022, renters’ reported that their average likelihood of owning a home was less than 50%, historically a way to build long-term wealth and supplement retirement income (Roepe, 2023).
Social Security payments, which are dwindling fast, comprise 90% or more of an individual’s retirement income today (Dagher, 2023).
Women—even those with a college degree—report feeling less comfortable in managing self-directed retirement savings (The Fed, 2022).
Only 53% of women have started saving for retirement, compared with 65% of men. Much of that disparity is a direct result of the gender pay gap (Krawcheck, 2016).
While over 75% of married people are adequately prepared for retirement, only 55% of singles are (RAND, 2014).
People with disabilities have fewer retirement savings than those without (The Fed, 2022).
In beginning to answer these questions, I am: (1) letting go of any of the shame, guilt, or disappointment in not meeting societal expectations of how much I should have saved for retirement at my age; and (2) recognizing the deep need for a class and race conscious analysis of our community building work on this platform.
So, where does this leave us? How can the Next Egg better support those with little to no retirement savings on this platform (beyond encouraging them to simply save more/better)?