According to the survey, if you're over the age of 55 you need to contribute more than 45% of your income through the rest of your career to retire by age 65. Who can do that " no one.
If you're a little younger, let's say between 45 and 55, you can get away with putting one fifth of your pay into your 401(k), but again, what company even allows you to do that?
Basically, what this study is telling us is that for most Americans, the word retirement is something they'll be able to look back to and say, oh yeah, my parents were able to retire. But me I have to keep working.
The word retirement will no longer have any meaning for most of us. You could probably replace it with "too old to work or "too old to find a job but calling that period of our lives when we still need to work but can't "retirement doesn't quite capture the true sentiment of what the word was supposed to mean.
That's why whenever I see surveys like this, and they've been appear more frequently lately, I feel the need to raise the awareness that the word "retirement is slowly becoming meaningless and that we need a new word to replace it.
The Nyhart study is among the first to reveal the massive impact the economic recession of 2008-to-2010 has had on consumers age 55 and older who may have once expected to retire at age 65.
Craig Harrell, a senior retirement advisor and researcher in the study, said most employees were not saving enough for retirement before the recession, but following it those older works age 60 to 64 simply lack the time to make up those losses.
Nyhart conducted a six-month study of nearly 10,000 employees working at 110 public and private companies reviewing incomes, ages and retirement plan balances.
Do these findings mean that if you're above a certain age you should just throw in the towel? Of course not. It just means that you'll have to re-adjust plans for the future to include working ten to 15 more years than originally anticipated and contributing as much as you can to a 401(k) plan or an individual retirement account and then when the time comes to retire, in your late 70s or early 80s, you'll at least have more than your social security to live on.
