Most boomers had no idea about this or even how to save. The ones that had company organized 401 plans and contribution sharing and that understood how to use it and did it early enough should come out well. The rest, not so much.
How many people understand that you need to salt away at least 25% of your before tax gross at 6% to be able to afford to retire? Where is the hand book that tells them that? There isn’t one.
How many kids understand that you save for cars and houses and you invest for retirement?
And whose fault is that?
“you need to salt away at least 25% of your before tax gross at 6% to be able to afford to retire”
That’s absurd. In fact total bullshit.
How many kids understand that you save for cars and houses and you invest for retirement?
I guess I was lucky, in that, my parents educated us about these subjects.
And in my high school, we had a couple of classes in consumer math, which was a math class, but we dealt with real world math issues, such as how credit cards work, how mortgages work, how the stock market works, etc.
So I think I had a decent education in that as I began my working life. sadly too many apparently don’t.
I think my classes in school helped me a lot, and think it would be good to require such classes in high school. To the extent that we expect schools to help prepare students for the real world they will live in, classes in consumer finance would be good to require in my opinion.
Funny thing.
When I stared out, it wasn’t 25% of your income, it was closer to 10%. I have the old flyers from my first job.
The problem is that there is no way for most people to do that. Kids, student loans, healthcare, all eat into that.
We live in a small house, in a small town, and send our kids to a religious school. I save about 17% of my income, my wife about the same for hers. But remember this.
The big companies jumped out of pensions because they couldn’t make it work. My wife’s cousin ran some pension funds, and he said “it is mathematically impossible to pay for three workforces, of which the smallest one is actually making product.” Now, we have been pushed into the Wall Street government subsidy (401k), which is all find and dandy till the boomers cash out.
Retirement is a recent thing. Most people worked till they died, and that was much earlier than now. We are going to head back to that.