MikeS was kind enough to bring this CNN Money article to my attention last week (thanks again, MikeS). In short, 1153 workers and retirees were surveyed and 43% of them had less than $10,000 saved up for retirement – not including their house or pension.
When I started reading, I was ready to be frustrated that so many have so little for their own retirement. By the end of the article, I still felt that way but not because of these survey results. Call me whatever, but a home and a pension count towards retirement, right?
Then I saw this little poll on the side of an article I was reading on Yahoo…it whacked me in the face pretty hard since almost 10,000 people had responded with how much they contribute to a retirement account:
- 31% are saving 1-6%
- 18% are saving 7-10%
- 8% are saving 11-15%
- 8% are saving more than 15%
- AND 34% aren’t contributing to a retirement account at all
About a third of the respondents aren’t contributing to a retirement account at all!!! I understand that not everybody has access to a 401k or an equivalent, but I interpret this to mean that they aren’t contributing to any kind of IRA or retirement savings account either…that’s just insane to me.
Are you saving for retirement?
As I’ve posted before, our main financial goal is early retirement, so we are really dedicated (aka gazelle-intense…lol…that always makes me laugh and look around for predators).
Even if people don’t want to leave their jobs, I do hope that most people over the age of 30 will start funding their own retirement. I would hate to know that I’d have to work until I die even if I wanted to…the difference between having choices and not having choices is gigantic to me.
What’s your take on all this? What did you think about the article?
[...] are millions of people passing up free money in the form of 401(k) matching, but as I mentioned here, according to a little side survey that was answered by almost 10,000 people, at least a third of [...]