By the standards of most financial experts, Americans are woefully behind on saving for retirement. The reason why is rooted in changes to the country’s retirement system that resulted in a flawed design for how people set aside money.
Why it’s so hard for Americans to retire
There’s a reason so many of us don’t have enough retirement savings.
Laura Bult came to the video team via Vox’s Netflix show, Explained , and previously worked on documentary series for National Geographic and Zero Point Zero Production.
In this video, we interviewed four people about their level of retirement preparedness and two experts about the state of retirement readiness in the US. One culprit lies in changes to the country’s pension system, which sets the US apart from countries like Australia and the UK, which help people save money for retirement.
Sources and further reading:
- Vanguard’s “How America Saves” report was recommended by one of our experts, John Scott, and provided some of the data in the video
- John Scott’s work at the Pew Charitable Trusts includes how lack of retirement readiness impacts state and federal budgets
- Teresa Ghilarducci has written extensively about retirement, including her book Work, Retire, Repeat
- Sen. Bernie Sanders has released a report about how the state of US retirement impacts low-income seniors
- We used the TransAmerica Retirement survey for some of our data
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