I sure wish I had 955$ saved!
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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well the solution is simple: deport brown people, ban trans people and give more money and tax cuts to corporations and billionaires. it'll all be over soon.
JFC this is depressing. Hopefully it forces some change though. I like that post about the French boyfriend asking why we don't burn shit. Hunger will make people burn shit.
6 meals away from anarchy or sumthin
Real talk!
Fucking high rollers over there
My retirement plan is to die at work, that way my family is taken care of. (who am I kidding, my work will try to weasel out of paying them if that happens)
Learn from the French: burn shit before you get to the point of starvation.
I mean, it took starvation for them to start burning shit the first time. But at least they learned from that, and haven’t let it get as bad since then.
This is simply Americans’ first time experiencing the wrong side of the “let them eat cake” thing, so of course it’ll take a long time for America to start lighting things on fire.
Your family will be lucky to get a pizza party.
The pizza dough contains potassium bromate which may be carcinogenic
“He worked so hard, we loved him. Were like family here. KThxBye.”
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Without universal healthcare, even if you save millions, it can all be wiped out with a single illness.
Health insurance companies are counting on it. Delay deny depose
I'm sure the situation is dire, but I'm not sure it communicates an accurate picture by lumping in 21 year olds with people who've been in the workforce for decades.
21 yr olds who are just entering the workforce or are in college aren't expected to have much, if any, retirement savings at that stage in their lives.
A better picture would be to break it down by age group. Still not a pretty picture, I'm sure.
They've done that in the research, it's just a clickbait headline with very, very light details. After following a few clicks I found the PDF [1] in which they break it apart by many groups and factors (age, race, savings plan, income, student loan debt, all sorts of stuff) and that $955 figure falls under the "workers who do not have $1 in a DC" (meaning workers with no access to a savings plan). For those with access, the number is $40,000 average.
[1] https://www.nirsonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NIRS_2026-Retirement-in-America-FINAL.pdf
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Lots of people saying it's a skill issue that people aren't saving more of their earnings. The problem is much deeper: it doesn't make sense for the majority of Americans to save their money. This is the rational outcome of a political and economic system that does not offer hope, only cynicism.
If it was a handful of people, it could MAYBE be a skill issue. But when it's most people, it's a systemic issue.
I had an argument about that with the college when I failed ochem. 2/3 of the students failed ochem that year. My argument was basically they made the tests too hard just to weed people out because I aced the lab class and always had As on my papers. Papers where you performed real world calculations not insane ones. There reply was basically yeah its a weed out class take it again or switch majors but we'll let you keep your scholarship... for now. Kept major, switched schools a year later then switched majors.
I had several 401ks, I cashed them out fairly quickly because an emergency would come along and it was the only thing between me and homelessness, or not receiving medical care.
Now I have a 403(b) because I work for higher ed, and I am forbidden to cash it out, but I've taken a loan against it and paid off my credit cards, and am paying myself interest now.
So now I have my CCs freed up for the next time I have an emergency, which will be checks watch
I had almost completely strip-mined my 401k and post-tax investments by the time I was 56 due to a family member's mental-health crisis and the downstream impact of that (it was worth it: the family member in question is now stable and thriving). I'm now 70 and should be able to retire next year if some other emegency doesn't bite us on the ass before then. It took 14 years to rebuild, and that was with my wife and me both bringing in professional salaries and having additional investments.
I feel the "checking watch for next emergency"
I'm just about done paying off my last emergency so I'm right on time for the next big one. Fate seems to wait until I'm spitting distance from paying it off to taunt me or some shit.
The last time I was literally 1 month from having it paid off before BOOM $10k medical emergency and to not become homeless due to said medical emergency combined with being on FMLA for 12 weeks minus a day.
It don't like like a lot to some but for me it's been hell.
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Garbage.
Tell me the average of all people who have more than zero (and the number that represents), then tell me how many have zero.
This number 955 doesn't mean shit.
This is a terrible stat. Taking the people who are entering the workforce and averaging them with people who have spent a lifetime working. Not only that, but that’s just “retirement” savings. How many 20 year olds have retirement accounts?
The information would be far more realistic if it were grouped by decade of life.
Edit: Here. This is a little better
Savings
Retirement savings
If by "average," they mean "mean," that's not a useful figure, since it's skewed by the disproportionate rewards going to the rich. And that's what that chart looks like. There's no way that the median for US people in their 60s is anywhere near $200k unless that involves some bullshit like imputing an NPV to their social security entitlement.
OK, so I did some searching.
Here's a more informative set of stats and charts: https://dqydj.com/retirement-savings-by-age/
The age 60-64 median according to their more rigorous methodology is $10,400, not $200k.
Still very bleak. Nobody is retiring comfortably on $60k, much less $10k.
Might be worth factoring in SS, as that's the real practical retirement savings people rely upon.
The $60k represents remaining savings at age 80-89.
Look at the 60-69 column for what people have around the time they start retiring. But not that those are means, not median figures, so are skewed by the US's vast levels of inequality.
Median, not average, so much better at showing this situation than mean but it's still not great. I agree that it should be broken up, but the difficulty is how you define the grouping will have a significant impact on the results, especially in early and later years.
I'd prefer median by age graphed by age. Average by any grouping will skew heavily if there is a lot of variance, and I absolutely expect there is in the US. A box-and-whisker plot could also be ideal here, but you still have the grouping problem.
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If your employer offers a 401(k) match, not trying to take advantage of that is one of the absolute dumbest financial moves you can make. Yes, I understand people sometimes can’t that’s why I said “try”.
Another move is not investing early. The biggest boost to wealth in retirement is start saving early to take advantage of compounding interest.
I'll upvote for the "try". Most people I know in tight spots need the money NOW. They are barely thinking 1 year ahead let alone 40.
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And you guys don't have a state pension either, right?
You guys really need to get on with a revolution. Work until you die is kinda supposed to be something we are moving away from
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I would say that is intended. Every day I'm more convinced that the US is the Billionaire playground where they can test out how to press the most money out of the population.
With the big police state and enormous prison capacity ready to counter the eventual revolution.
Perhaps they are suprised themselves that no one revolts as they suck more and more money out of the population and reveal more and more of the degenerate lifestyle of the elites.
"They know that we f*ck and kill children and still don't revolt? What else do we need to do? We already take nearly all their money. Well, let's destroy the pension funds, perhaps that does the trick..."
We’re modern history’s largest slave empire. These rich are the descendants of actual slavers who were brutally violent. They treat this place like a plantation. It’s part of the culture of the American ruling class.
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Social Security was the single greatest transfer of wealth from employers to employees in US history
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Soon there will be a critical mass of people who have nothing left to lose. Thats why the Democrats and Republicans need the military in the streets. Their wealthy benefactors cannot allow anything like the New Deal to happen again.
They have never wanted us to retire. They want us to work until we die.
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Our lavish lifestyles include paying for food, shelter, healthcare, power and water and it keeps costing more and more but there’s record shareholder profits!!!! Yeah! You should be happy that the economy is great for pedofiles who rape children and possibly(checks notes) eat babies on yachts. Cool! they’re openly using all our tax dollars with the goal of making us working people obsolete while mass surveilling us and killing dissenters in the streets. Awesome
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I will be so happy eating cat food years from now knowing that I was more prepared than the average person.
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