> My younger sister, Sophie, isn't worried about retirement – but she's not exactly optimistic about it, either. "We've got climate change, war – it's like, are we even going to be here to retire?"
I see this belief in a lot of younger co-workers. Newsflash: You're highly likely to outlive your ability to work. If your plan is to die the day after you retire, that may happen, but in all likelihood you won't, and not having savings is going to end up unpleasantly for you. Save for retirement, people!
The article names many reasons why it isn’t so simple. None of those reasons are that Gen Z decided against saving money.
I do agree that opening with a quote about other larger issues may not have been helpful. It’s not like other generations didn’t have to worry about e.g. nuclear war. It’s really not the point though.
Hang on, what retirement? There's no social security, there's no potential to live on a fixed income, inflation has effectively restarted the clock on a lot of retirement plans. I'm not gen-z but I fully understand I will need to work as long as my heart beats. I say this -with- a retirement fund.
This also seems like a natural consequence of crazy inflation and outlandishly unaffordable house prices. When the target is out of reach, it's hard to motivate to even try.
Even with compound interest $100/mo is only going to yield retirement like savings over 40 years with >=10% interest rates and monthly compounding.
It also neglects the fact that the cost of retirement might be much higher when that time comes.
Your whole spend less argument ignores the whole point of the article. These disillusioned people aren’t going to spend less because they don’t think it’s going to pay off. They’re optimizing for happiness in the present moment and that might end up being the right choice.
> everyone can find an extra $50-100 monthly to stash away for retirement
And if you are extraordinarily lucky, perhaps you will get to keep it. More likely, some ordinary life obstacle will come along and wipe it out. When your car breaks down and you need to spend $1000 getting it running again so you can keep your job, are you going to leave that savings money alone, or are you going to spend it? Of course you are going to spend it, because the alternative would be going (further) into debt, and then you would have to spend the next 12 months paying off that debt instead of saving any more money. But in that 12 months, some other thing is bound to happen: perhaps you'll get sick, or you'll have to move and put down a new rental deposit, or any of the other million things that constantly knock people's lives off balance.
It takes multiple consecutive years of good luck before one can get to a position where your advice would be applicable.
> It takes multiple consecutive years of good luck
This is profoundly incorrect. A retirement account cannot easily be withdrawn from for starters... and if you're not using a tax sheltered retirement account (why? you can open one as an individual), then at a minimum having that money go into a second bank account is as simple as filing out a form with your employer. It's amazing how quickly the money will pile up if you just forget all about it.
People who honestly struggle to find $50 of unwisely-spent money per month are either very young or have spent a life messing up. It's really hard to not be able to save for retirement in the US over a 40+ year career. Like, you have to be going out of your way to make poor choices.
The people spending 40+ years making poor choices then turn around and expect everyone else to provide for them in retirement. The audacity is increadible...
Oh, well, have fun feeling superior, I suppose; your perspective is not going to help you understand why people who have not been quite so fortunate as you have tend to make the kinds of decisions that we do.
When you are young, saving anything, even $50-100 monthly ends up being significant for retirement. If you can get employer matching, it's even better.
Then, over a 40+ year career, you are wanting me to believe/accept that it isn't the individual's fault they are still living paycheck to paycheck and cannot save for retirement? Like I said, you have to try to not save at that point in your career. I don't know of a single career that earns a paycheck but doesn't offer retirement plans... I know lots of jobs that don't, but not careers. People working jobs for 40+ years are indeed messing up...
Saving for retirement is perhaps the easiest financial thing you will ever do. It requires filing out a form for your employer, and then you can forget about it if you want.
Instead, some people want to act helpless and then expect others to carry them in retirement. Seems fair...
Maybe try considering that $1200/yr towards retirement doesn’t provide much comfort when that doesn’t even cover a month’s worth of rent today.
It’s okay to admit that while you also had it hard, younger people have it much, much harder. This shouldn’t be surprising. Home ownership is completely off the table if all that can be spared is $1200/yr.
Do you even look at the price tag of bananas when you buy them? Consider perhaps that the date of your birth has more impact than your rugged sacrifice and work ethic. I see plenty of both of those things in my zoomer friends and it doesn’t make rent more affordable.
I’ll add for transparency that I make a very comfortable six figure salary at an old, stable software company you’ve likely heard of. I stay in my amenity-less apartment because the rent is low enough to keep the shaky dream of home ownership alive. I even have pretty generous RSUs. I am extremely lucky. Even still, without ~equal partnership and shared ownership with someone roughly as wealthy as me, I couldn’t afford to own a home in the neighbourhood I grew up in. I’m 29 years old and have been making this much for three years. There aren’t many jobs that pay better than this.
Spare me your financial advice and think of people who make less than a third of what I make who grew up next to me. Some of them work good union blue collar jobs that your parents would have respected. Everything has outpaced wage growth. Everything.
It's $1200 a year for the first year or so, then it's more and more over a 40 year career. I don't understand why this is a difficult concept to grasp - your income increases as you develop your career... and so does your retirement contributions.
This fictitious person who can't scrape together $100 a month for retirement but has worked for 5, 10, 20+ years is a complete myth, or a total failure on a personal level.
> everyone can find an extra $50-100 monthly to stash away for retirement. With compound interest over a 40+ year working career, this is not trivial money.
This amount of money is likely to pay for a couple of surgeries (assuming no other complications or chronic illnesses eating your savings before then) past the age of 50, given how expensive health care is.
It's not a significant amount of money to let you retire in any kind of comfort. Maybe just not starve.
No amount of financial prudence is going to change the math for you if your set of skills caps out at $20/hour on the employment market.
> No amount of financial prudence is going to change the math for you if your set of skills caps out at $20/hour on the employment market
Which is a significant issue. How is it even possible to spend 40+ years doing something (anything) and not acquire skills that earn more than minimum wage or barely above?
40 years is approximately 83,200 working hours. Metaphoric you had 83,200 hours to figure out some sort of skill and work your way up in whatever field you have chosen... but you chose not to. That's a significant issue.
The salary only depends on what you look like or who you know, not what you do. If you're a beautiful chef and can avoid rapists bosses, you can work on a yacht for 2-4 times as much as a chef in an average restaurant and only work three month a year, studying the 9 other months (someone I know is in M1 doing this). If you're a normal chef (or even working at a starred restaurant you don't own), good luck getting the opportunity. And you'll have destroyed ankles, back and feet by the time you're 35 (incidentally, I do not know any second or 'chef de partie' (don't find the translation) over 30yo).
This is slightly less true for tech work though. If they don't have a cure for carpel tunnel syndrome by 2050, I'll retire I guess - but why should I when tech is so lucrative if it still somehow looks like how it does today?
Everyone seems in such a rush to stop earning money. Maybe be in a rush to get a "rest and vest" job instead? I plan to be some senior director at the 2050 equivalent of a sleepy and comfy giant company like IBM or Salesforce. By the time they realize I've stopped delivering value half a decade ago and lay me off, I'm already old enough to get the maximum possible monthly social security benefits AND will have prolonged my tech wealth earnings, likely with a house which is hopefully paid off. And I haven't even mentioned the golden parachute of long term severance packages!
I get it if you're doing back breaking work, but this is HN! Most of the folks here have nothing more to worry about except eye strain/blindness, deafness, and carpel tunnel.
It's probably worse in tech, due to the rampant age discrimination that's been normalized in this industry. Your plan to become "some senior director" is probably the only way to remain employed at a tech company in your 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s. Good luck doing that as an individual programmer or low-level manager.
> It's probably worse in tech, due to the rampant age discrimination that's been normalized in this industry.
I haven't worked many places, but I have a feeling that working for a company that has tech but doesn't identify as a tech company is probably the way to go. Also stay the hell away from the Bay Area.
Tech company culture seems so dysfunctional (e.g. the normalized age discrimination, etc.).
I can't tell if this comment is sarcastic or not, but in case it's not, I think the reason people are in a "rush to stop earning money" is that they have things they like to do more than work and they want to maximize their time spent doing those things.
When you're spending almost everything on food, rent, and healthcare surviving till tomorrow is a much bigger issue than figuring out what to do 20-50 years from now. Late stage capitalism is doing a good job of sucking up excess money and returning it to the investor class via rents, if you're not in the infestor class then you are struggling.
It is true, and that’s why I dislike the top line metrics. The stock market is doing great! Unemployment is low! GDP is up!
But the hidden assumption, that these metrics would be coupled with second-order metrics like life expectancy, home ownership, health, and well-being? That no longer holds.
These consequences today are all the results of political decisions made decades ago. The unfortunate reality is that turning this ship around will also take decades.
I see this belief in a lot of younger co-workers. Newsflash: You're highly likely to outlive your ability to work. If your plan is to die the day after you retire, that may happen, but in all likelihood you won't, and not having savings is going to end up unpleasantly for you. Save for retirement, people!