I caught an article today on MarketWatch that made it sound like Generation X, my peeps, were really in the doghouse when it came to retirement planning, only saving barely over an average of $100,000 for retirement so far. With time ticking and a short remaining career window it was giving financial advisors nightmares thinking about us collectively. Uh, really? Why am I just hearing about that now?
"Why is Gen X so far behind? Many members of Gen X graduated college or high school during a recession."
Yep, this is true. We mainly graduated during what was called the Bush Recession, under Bush Sr.'s presidency right after the roaring late 1980s when Wall Street orgies couldn't be outdone. Hell, the even made successful movies about the previous decades hedge fund managers. Instead, we came out to an economy where our parents were being laid off from jobs, the traditional pension was arbitrarily being wiped out, 401K were marketed as the next best thing since sliced bread, and the first Persian Gulf war was in full swing. Yep, good times. That said, we didn't use all that as an excuse. Already knowing our cheap-ass boomer parents weren't going to help much, we flooded temp agencies, took on multiple jobs, rented together, and created the foundations for the gig-economy years later. Many in tech were in the early days of the dot-com boom too, which gave a lot of us a 2nd wind for real estate in the early 2000s.
We also had kids late. Instead of jumping on the stork wagon in our 20s, we avoided marriage and kids like the plague. Most of us didn't start families until our early 30s, again due to the cost of living being out of reach for such things. It was only as we settled into actual full-time work did having a family make sense.
"A new study from Nationwide Financial revealed that 61% of nonretired Gen X-ers didn’t view retirement as a serious priority until age 50 or older..."
Well yeah, it was called paying the rent and skyrocketing gas prices for keeping a basic car on the road to get to work. Sure, many of us had our little daily luxuries; that's how businesses like Starbucks and thousands of other cafes made a livelihood off of us. The whole coffee culture became slapstick with the sitcom, Friends, over the years. Additionally, having watched our parents lose their pensions or get stuck with meaningless leftovers from bankrupt companies and then having to go back to work or avoid retiring taught us a very valuable lesson: employers didn't give a flying shit about their workers and it was every man/woman for themselves. Retirement meant nothing because we really believed we would be working forever back then. Between the talk of Social Security going in the tank, and constant scrapping for today, why the hell would we think about retirement back then? The biggest mistake most of us made was not taking Bitcoin seriously when it first appeared.
“If we think about where Gen X is going as a whole, we’re going to see more heavy reliance on social safety nets at a time when those safety nets are facing their own problems,”
No, I highly doubt this. One thing my generation did do very well, which ironically was still the traditional American Dream, was get into real estate however we could. Buying a home, rentals, property etc. have become our retirement account, which the article does admit we were good at. It took us a while to get there, but getting into a home property was and remains the best retirement savings, aside from those few still lucky to have found a traditional pension job. Most properties have now fully doubled in value, and property prices continue to climb. Sure, the 2009 Recession was brutal, and a lot of us went "underwater" with mortgages. But, if we were smart enough to hold on, it all came back in value with a vengeance.
"Gen X needs to maintain their health so they can try to continue working as long as needed, and to keep their job skills up to date so they stay relevant and vital at work."
And here's the latest garbage. We didn't duped after seeing what happened to our parents' retirement, so were unlikely to fall into the same "keep working" crap again in our 50s. This is simply a plea to hold onto experience instead of seeing it convert to competition through better job offers elsewhere. Again, most of us have been working two jobs, one day job for a safety net and the second to explore and build inroads into jumping-off opportunities. We're not about to stick around if the going gets good elsewhere.
The health part is true though. Getting seriously sick is the biggest drain on anyone's savings or or assets, especially now with the cost of healthcare skyrocketing. Many of us are quite in agreement we can't keep having steaks and beer every night and actually do need to eat better, exercise, and watch what's going on with our bio-metrics. We just don't make a big deal about it. Sleep is gold and avoiding stress is right after that benefit.
"Gen X is a scrappy bunch. This is the generation that rode bikes without helmets, drank from the garden hose, raged against the machine. They were latch-key kids."
True, most of us learned life through the school of hard knocks. We don't ask for breaks, we don't expect them from anyone either. That makes us come across blunt, rude, maybe even selfish and uncaring. We are many times the opposite, just not for the latest social cause or coffee break group topic. We're too busy figuring out how to get ahead and avoid the next scam. We're a skeptical bunch, being raised on an American Dream that we were kept out of. We treat everyone now as a scam until proven otherwise, including family.
I get a lot of Gen X is crunched right now. We are in that sandwich generation phase, still caring for the kids we had late and boomer parents who are more like babies now than adults due to dementia or similar. But unlike this article's premise, most of us are actually doing okay with an owned roof over our heads, a make-it-work attitude, and little in the way of compromise that costs time and money. The one's who are really hurting are the financial advisors who won't get much of our business coming their way for retirement planning. We're too busy working for ourselves.
https://extension.unh.edu/blog/2024/11/generation-x-forgotten-generation
https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/generations-age/generations/generation-x/
