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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
Which is both in the article and OP summary.
$40,000 still approaches zero. Its one or 2 years of expenses at best.
Why, you're welcome for the link to the PDF! I'm glad you enjoyed reading it and appreciate your insightful and loquacious feedback on the matter at hand. You are a true gem of the lemmyverse, evenglow.
Evenglow, thoughts arrive like butterflies Oh, he don’t know, so he chases them away
Median and average are not the same. Median is going to be skewed very low compared to average in this case.
This is still a shockingly low number. If you graduate with a bachelors and get a job our of college and contribute to a 401k, you should easily hit 1k saved within a year. If you didn't go to college and started working at 18, you'll be making less, but should still be able to save 1k by 22. Even shitty employers have retirement programs, it's just that most hourly workers won't take the time to sign up. There's only one way the median can be 1k, and that's because at least 40% have $0 saved and the whole system is completely broken for them.
This also seriously depends on the employer. One of the first things that gets slashed during benefit cuts is reitrement accounts, because they're an easy target and you're not "losing" the money.
I didn't start having meaningful savings until my mid 20s. When i bought a house paying off the mortgage became a priority over saving for retirement. I'll be better off paying less interest and reducing my expenses faster than I would be collecting interest on that money. In theory i could out perform my mortgage interest rate by trading stocks, but that is a lot riskier than paying off the mortgage.
Trading stocks is probably the worst investment strategy any normal person with a market-unrelated job and life responsibilities could pursue, with almost guaranteed losses in the long term. Good on you for identifying the high risk early in life- never forget it. That being said, there's very strong arguments for investing in stocks, but do it the boring way: large blended ETFs with a low expense ratio (like VTI, VTV, VOO, VXUS, or the Boglehead favorite: VT) or mutual funds. Don't "trade," buy and hold and try to forget you even have a brokerage account housing those blended, diversified funds. Try to use tax-advantaged vehicles as much as possible, like a Roth IRA or a Roth option in a 401k. Your mortgage APR is what? 4-7%? The market should definitely outperform that in the long term, and you can reduce your exposure to acute transient shifts even more by dollar cost averaging into your savings. I'm all for paying off debt as quickly as possible, for the psychological benefit, but there's also the rate race of your investment's probable APY vs your debt's APR.
I've been diversifying into some long term stock options in some of my savings accounts. I live quite frugally so I am able to still save a bit while paying a bit extra to my mortgage. So far I've done pretty good in the markets but my trading accounts aren't significant sums of money, when they do well I sometimes wish I invested more but when a stock is down bad I'm reminded why I keep those sums low.
People underestimate what even $50 a month can do over time. Sure it might not be down payment money but it could be enough to build a safety net so you can try a new job or move somewhere else with a bit more behind you.
Wouldn't surprise me at all if the average retirement savings of those in their 50s is like $100,000
Not a bad guess at all.
I'm slightly heartened to see the average is higher than I thought