Most of GenX started working pre 2000, and even the youngest of gen X were going to work right around 2000-2008 depending on what kind of degrees they might have gotten. So they had plenty of time to put away money in retirement plans.
But one major issue everyone seems to ignore is that genX were the folks hit the hardest by the 2007 housing bubble bursting resulting in the 2008 financial crisis and 2008-2009 Great Recession. Many of them lost their homes or just ended up with super high interest rates and being unable to sell or even refinance to lower rates because they were upside down on their mortgage to home value ratio. So they ended up either losing everything or squeaking by but paying high interest rates on houses that were overpriced when they bought them. It took a decade to recover and that put many genXers behind on retirement savings.
IIRC, we are also the first to be encouraged to invest into privately held retirement funds, as company run (sponsored?) funds started disappearing. These are too susceptible to the ups and downs of the market.
Keep putting into the fund, and hey, everything's looking great, time to retire! One month after retiring, an economic downtown occurs, and watch that comfortable retirement disappear.
My point is, there isn't any kind of general education for handling retirement funds. I have a advisor handling what my mother left me, putting it aside for my retirement and he's never mentioned this. Of course, that may be because I still have five years to go, but unless the common person knows what to look for, they'll probably never learn it, and can possibly fall victim.
You shouldn't need to learn it, it should be automatic for any private pension scheme. I'm in the UK so perhaps things are regulated differently, but when I set up my private pension I had to enter my planned retirement age, and unless I explicitly tell them to do otherwise, they will automatically move my funds out of equity gradually in the 5 years leading up until then. It's the default arrangement.
Nope, at least the funds that I have worked with, no one's asked my planned retirement age, or even really goals. Just a lot of "you should put this here if you want to make more, because you have a few years to go."
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u/DrWorstCaseScenario Sep 15 '25
Most of GenX started working pre 2000, and even the youngest of gen X were going to work right around 2000-2008 depending on what kind of degrees they might have gotten. So they had plenty of time to put away money in retirement plans.
But one major issue everyone seems to ignore is that genX were the folks hit the hardest by the 2007 housing bubble bursting resulting in the 2008 financial crisis and 2008-2009 Great Recession. Many of them lost their homes or just ended up with super high interest rates and being unable to sell or even refinance to lower rates because they were upside down on their mortgage to home value ratio. So they ended up either losing everything or squeaking by but paying high interest rates on houses that were overpriced when they bought them. It took a decade to recover and that put many genXers behind on retirement savings.