Hannah Miao

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241 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2022 last heard Aug 2024

Hannah Miao’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Generation X Is Turning 60, and Many Can’t Afford to Retire · 23 Aug 2024 podcast

Gen X is kind of sandwiched in between them.

There's about 65 million members of Gen X. So they're often left out of the conversation.

Sometimes people call them the middle child of the generational cohorts.

There are some measures that show that Gen X right now is financially worse off than baby boomers were at the same age.

So one measure we can look at is household net worth as measured by the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances.

So for U.S.

households that were led by Gen Xers between 45 and 54 years old in 2022,

they had a median household net worth that was about $250,000 at that time.

And that is about 7% lower than that of baby boomers at the same age in 2007, according to inflation-adjusted Fed data.

That was really the only age group where we experienced a drop in median wealth over that 15-year period.

Gen Xers were really the guinea pigs of the 401k system.

The 401k is named for a change in the tax code from 1978, and it really picked up steam in the 80s.

So when Gen Xers were entering the workforce and starting their careers,

The 401k system was still relatively new, and a lot of the features that are now commonplace with 401ks, such as automatically enrolling employees into those plans, automatically upping those contributions over the years as employees' income increases, those features didn't come about until later in Gen X's career.

So it was a new system, and Gen X was really caught in the middle of that transition.

So one figure we can look at is Vanguard Group, which is a very large retirement plan provider, puts out a study of what those aggregate balances are.

So we saw that in 2023, workers between 45 and 54 years old had a median account balance of roughly $60,000 in retirement plans that are like 401ks, an employer-sponsored retirement plan.

And if you think about it, for most Americans, that is not a ton of money to get by on for your entire retirement.

A lot of financial experts will recommend having roughly six times one salary saved by the time you're 50 years old.

So we can see from that measure at least a lot of people have a ways to go in having enough money to supplement their retirement expenses.

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