Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan.
For many years, the store did well – they even opened a second location. Claire started to feel financially secure. “A few years ago I was like, wow, I actually might be able to do this until I retire,” she told me. “I’ll never be rich, but I have a really wonderful work-life balance and I’ll have enough.”
But in midlife, she can’t afford to buy a house, and she’s increasingly worried about what retirement would look like, or if it would even be possible. “Was I foolish to think this could work?” she now wonders.
She’s one of many millennials who, in their 40s, are panicking about the realities of midlife: financial precarity, housing insecurity, job instability and difficulty saving for the future. It’s a different kind of midlife crisis – less impulsive sports car purchase and more “will I ever retire?” In fact, a new survey of 1,000 millennials showed that 81% feel they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis. Our generation is the first to be downwardly mobile, at least in the US, and do less well than our parents financially. What will the next 40 years will look like?
This is another one of many things that the government should be taking care of for people (and they sort of tried to with Social Security) but of course the “privatize everything” sociopath elites killed that idea, and our culture expects everyone to just learn how to Warren Buffet better. Bro, do you even index fund?
For the last 10 years when I’ve been asked about my career goals during job interviews I always respond, “I would like to retire.” I then clarify that I don’t mean tomorrow, next year, or even 5 years down the road. I just don’t want to die a wage slave.
My wife has a job with an awesome pension and as a result there is basically no situation she will ever leave. I pointed out to her that the golden handcuffs are still golden.
One day some MBAs are going to learn that if you don’t want constant turn over you give workers a pension so great they would crawl over their mother’s corpse to get it.
What am I saying? MBAs learning? Hahaha I love being silly.
I searched what MBA actually means. Fuck that shit. Degree in “Business Administration” sounds like degree in praying. Wait, there is one! Fuck!
It doesn’t matter if any specific MBA learns a lesson. Some other douche canoe will swing by and have their single brain cell fire off just this one time and they’ll start hacking away at the pensions to make Q3 look better.
Boeing style.
No more moon shots, contract out everything, slash pensions, fight a war against your union, move corporate away from production, buy your own stock.
Hell. Gen X also are worried about retirement.
Will social security be here in 15 years? My 401k has not kept up at all… Everything today costs soooooooo much there’s no real room for saving.
Right??
Early Gen Z / very tail end of millennial here.
Got a job that pays ~80k (with promotion potential to 100k in a year) and I’m just… dumbfounded at how yall are making it. I didn’t grow up wealthy at all, and struggled with homelessness for a time, so I’m not new to the frugal game, but being able to put away only a hundred or two bucks a month after taxes is crazy with the hours and time I put into existing. I’d rather just not work at all if the end result is the same.
Doordash is a crux in my life and something I’ve definitely splurged on in the past, but groceries are just as expensive outside of rice beans and chicken. Baffling. :(
LOL I’m never retiring. I’ve already accepted that I’ll be working until I’m dead. There are those who get dealt the right cards and will get to retire comfortably. I’m just not one of them.
Gonna leave a bit of advice for any young folks that might see this. Something I wish to god someone had told me when I was 20.
Start an annuity plan. They’re generally stable, all but guaranteed to accrue money. You can set a percentage of your paycheck to be deposited automatically into the account. If you have the option to do this through your employer, do it, find out if they match the deposit like mine. Put 10% of your paycheck in there. After 10 years, I have $40,000 sitting in a retirement account with a progressive series of bonds set to mature in between now and my retirement age. Those bonds will roll back into shorter term bonds as they mature, and add more value to the account. My projected retirement age is still 72, but at least I know that money is there.
Also, after 4 years, the account matures and you’re able to borrow against it, like collateral for a loan. So if I wanted to right now, I could take that money and use it as a down payment on a house. I’ll be expected to put it back, but the interest is generally lower than a home owner’s loan.
Generally speaking in the US annuities are horrible and significantly underperform a regular 401k/IRA invested in a broad total market index fund. The fees eat you alive. Don’t know how it is in other countries. But annuities here are damn near fraud.
Am millennial… xenniel or “elder millennial to be exact… I have completely given up on ever owning a home or being able to retire. Short of some major acts of public disruption at unprecedented, economy-toppling, billionaire-eating scale, my entire generation - and those after us - are fucked.
You only need like 5% down for a home. Zero if you are a veteran for some reason. Mortgage is almost always cheaper than renting.
Unfortunately, this age-old folk wisdom just isn’t true any more.
Near Los Angeles (and many/most big cities these days) even “fixer-upper””starter” homes cost $1,000,000.
5% down ($50k) would result in a monthly mortgage payment of $7,939.88 which more than twice my rent payment, which is already high.
And saving is nearly impossible given the rate at which the basic costs of living (including rent) have skyrocketed in recent decades.
It worked for me last year. Put 5% on a home near a major city, purchase price $425k
Some areas like LA are just a special kind of fucked, but you don’t have to live there.
The lesson here is do the calculations for your area. There are a lot of “buy vs rent” calculators online.
Yeah, I bought fairly recently (as interest rates were starting to climb) and it was 100% a qol decision rather than a financial one. I’m paying more in interest now than I was paying in rent before, so instead of giving my money away to a landlord, I’m giving it away to my mortgage company.
The only way I’ll come out ahead financially is if the value goes up. But I have mixed feelings on that, too, because the housing situation is fucked here and value continuing to go up will mean that the situation is still fucked. I don’t want this place to be my home forever, so if the price here goes up, then the price of better places will also go up and it ends up being a wash until I don’t need to own and can sell, but even that would be tough because inheritance is probably going to be my daughter’s only way of ever owning her own place.
Or, on the other hand, if they fix the housing issue here by limiting the number of residences any person can own and barring corporations from owning at all (or at least not having them count as new people for number of places they can own), then prices will crash and most people who currently has a mortgage will end up owing more than their house is worth and will still be fucked in that way. Unless the government makes the banks eat some of that or does a bailout for homeowners.
But anything in the above paragraph would probably take a revolution to actually happen because all of these bugs for regular people are features for those that have the wealth to influence the political power.
Or best option, rather than a crash we massage the housing market into stagnation for a decade or two with a combination of increased supply and gradual regulation. Stagnation in housing prices will over time let wages catch up.
And yet we act like boiled frogs, each generation making fun of the prior one for expecting things to be better than they are. Gen z is so used to things being like shit that they think that all older generations are entitled fuckers And that we should get used to everything being worse because Right now it’s the best they’ve ever known.
No.
But one day I will get so desperatly poor that taking out someone in siphoning wealth from the country and ending them might seem like a fitting end.
If we don’t change things anyways.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
- John F. Kennedy
Let’s make peaceful revolution possible by campaigning for electoral reform at the state level! We should all be free to vote for those who best represent us, secure in the knowledge that our vote will still be cast against those we don’t want in office.
We don’t need to wait for trump to have a hamburger heart attack, we dont need to wait for the republicans to stop existing. We can do this right now… and some states already have!
Yours can to, most especially the blue states. Who is stopping you in those blue states?
I’m a late gen-Xer (born in '80, so I’m more of a “Xennial”). I have a stable job, pension, matching 401k, no kids, no debt (paid off my car and student loans), make 6 figures, and I am STILL convinced that I will never be able to retire. I feel horrible for all those who are in a worse financial situation than me, but we are all really fucked in the next 20 years.
I have a stable job, pension, matching 401k, no kids, no debt (paid off my car and student loans), make 6 figures, and I am STILL convinced that I will never be able to retire.
If this is your reality, there’s more wrong with your expectations than your situation.
Social Security is set to run out in the 2030s, and I fully expect the stock market to crash, effectively wiping out my 401k. As others have mentioned, resources like water will start to become scarce, inciting instability.
If you think the stock market crashing wipes your 401k to 0 and that’s realistic you need to get your head checked.
In 2020 it only dropped 20% and bounced back within 3 years.
Where do you chicken littles come from? Lol
SSI isn’t set to run out. It will have to be reduced if they don’t take the income cap off of it, however.
But all the other things you said will happen.
Correct. IIRC there’s an auto mechanism that will cut all benefits by 23% or something. So you’re mom/dad getting $2,000 a month would now only get about $1,500.
That’s very pessimistic.
I call it realistic. If you think everything is going to work out, you’re delusional, man. But I hope you prove me wrong some day, I really do.
Not for the entire southwestern United States. There’s 5 major cities off the top of my head getting ready to face a zero day. If you don’t think the stock market is going to react when that happens…
What’s a “zero day” in this context?
Zero day is the day a city runs out of water and must literally truck it in.
and I fully expect the stock market to crash, effectively wiping out my 401k.
You only lose money if you sell. Those who were able to stay the course after '08 made it all back and then some.
The risk is a huge crash right before you retire, or you have to pull from your 401k to fund living expenses.
she has about $75,000 saved up for a downpayment
Oh you poor child. That’s not even close to enough. 💀
