With 401(k)s taking a hit and the fate of Social Security uncertain, we get some advice for how to talk to the elders in your life about work and retirement. This episode was produced by Carla Javier and Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo credit: Momo Productions/Getty Images. Call us with your questions about personal style: 1-800-618-8545. You can also send us a note at vox.com/askvox. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What concerns do baby boomers have about retirement in today's economy?
I am 58 years old and I'm currently thinking about retiring from my state job and wondering, how do you know when you've got enough money? How do you know?
Hi, this is Claire. I'm 66. I want to retire. I need to retire. I'm so stressed out. I have a one-year-old grandson. I should retire, but I'm too terrified to because of everything that I see.
Hi, Claire. Hi, how are you?
What are some of the big questions you have about retirement right now?
Mostly it's, am I going to be able to have Social Security? I feel like its legs are trying to get cut out from under it and it's going to collapse from the weight. I feel like prices of everything is going to go up. The housing market is going to collapse. So I'm trying to find, mostly I want a crystal ball to get through this.
I just want to know what I can do now to protect myself more than what I've been thinking of.
This is unfortunately something that we have heard a lot from a lot of our readers.
This is Noah Shidelower, economy reporter at Business Insider. He has a particular focus on older Americans. I called him up because he's heard from more than 3,000 baby boomers.
It seems almost every conversation that I have with older Americans... talk about that in some regard, where a lot of people are saying, I prepared well, but how well did I prepare? Or some people are saying, well, I don't have a ton of money right now, and I'm really nervous. And we have noticed this across the board, across wealthy individuals, people who are lower income.
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Chapter 2: How is Social Security's future affecting older Americans' retirement plans?
Now I'm on the phone for four or five hours. We are hearing from a lot of people who are concerned about the future of Social Security. Will I continue getting the same allocation that I'm getting right now? And then you have just in general, a lot of older Americans are working later. So they're living longer, but they're also having to work a lot longer.
We are seeing some pushes right now among some Americans. representatives in Congress to potentially even push back the retirement age from 67 to 69 or 70. So there's definitely a lot of fear that a lot that a lot of older Americans have that they will need to keep working or they'll have to work until their 70s to supplement Social Security.
What are you looking for to better understand how this economy is impacting older Americans?
So we're looking at a lot of factors right now, a lot of indicators. The main thing that we're currently looking at is asset prices. A lot of older Americans and a lot of retirees who have a lot of equity in their homes and their home is essentially their retirement. This is a lot of money for some people. It's six, seven figures worth of retirement money.
And if a lot of their equity goes down, if the housing market kind of collapses a little bit, that will get messed up for a lot of people. And it's hard for older Americans to downsize as well because there's... you know, not a lot of houses on the market right now that are selling for affordable rates. With inflation, there's many different ways of analyzing it.
There's a measure that we use called the Alice Essentials Index.
Asset limited, income constrained, employed.
They look specifically at what's considered an essential. So grocery costs, for example, or housing, other sorts of medical expenses. This is what people need to survive. So this is a very interesting metric that we use to look at, well, OK, how is inflation impacting the economy? the person who is 75 and still working and is very cautious about their spending.
And it's indicative that inflation is rising a little bit more for some of those essentials than it is for some of the other goods that they might not be purchasing on a daily basis.
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Chapter 3: What economic factors impact retirees' financial security now?
And... They don't know if they should be tapping into their 401ks. They don't know if they should be relying more on other sorts of income and then they won't touch their 401k. So it's definitely all very valid. But I also think some of them are a little bit misguided. especially because Social Security benefits have not been cut. They have not cut Medicaid yet.
They have not touched Medicare yet. We just don't know what will happen. And we have been hearing from a lot of financial experts who this is their job. They speak with people who have been doing this for 30, 40 years, and they say you should stay tight, hang on, and don't do anything too drastic that you may regret later.
Okay, so don't do anything you would regret. Easier said than done, though. So how can you prepare for the worst case scenario? I'm going to ask one of my favorite personal finance columnists after this break.
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I'll be bringing the expertise to pass and the genuine opinion you need for the most exciting time of the NBA calendar. Small Ball is your essential companion for the NBA postseason. Join me, Kenny Beecham, for new episodes of Small Ball throughout the playoffs. Don't miss Small Ball with Kenny Beecham.
New episodes drop in through the playoffs, available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
This week on Profiteer Markets, we speak with Ryan Peterson, founder and CEO of Flexport, a leader in global supply chain management. We discuss how tariffs are actually impacting businesses, and we get Ryan's take on the likely outcomes of this ongoing trade war.
If they don't change anything and this 145% duty sticks on China, it'll take out like mass bankruptcies. We're talking like 80% of small business that buys from China will just die. And millions of employees will go, you know, we'll be unemployed. I mean, it's sort of why I'm like, they obviously have to back off the trade. Like, that can't be that they just do that.
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Chapter 4: Are older Americans panicking unnecessarily about their retirement funds?
You can find that conversation exclusively on the Prof G Markets podcast.
I am punching a lot of pillows.
We're back. It's Explain It To Me. And I'm here now with Michelle Singletary, personal finance columnist with The Washington Post.
Are you a baby boomer? Yeah. I mean, like many people, I'm stressed to the max. You know, I've got a couple of years or so before I was thinking, OK, maybe I will retire. So I still have about three or four years before I have that serious conversation with myself. My husband, however, is retired and has been since 2023. So we're looking at his retirement account.
We're looking at my retirement account. He's not as stressed as I am. Because he's always the glasses half full kind of person. I'm not only is the glass half empty, it's like it needs another glass with some water. So I'm very, you know, very concerned because you don't know when the end is near, right? And that's the issue with retirement planning.
I mean, if we knew when we are going to pass away, if we knew how much health care would we need, if we knew what the housing market would do, we'd be all calm. But it's the unknown. And so I am punching a lot of pillows and crying and screaming and doing a little cussing, but trying to not let the fear grow. dictate moves, and that's the key.
Yeah, what do you fear that could happen? What's the worst-case scenario?
Historically, the markets do return eventually. People come back. The underlying part of America, the economy, is still strong. So it's the fear is how long will it take? And if you have to draw down on your retirement funds, that is what is disconcerting because the balance is lower. And so you are pulling it out at a time where you're definitely going to lock in recent losses.
Then that means there'll be less left to grow even when the market returns. When you are retired and drawing on that, that is the fear that you'll have less. And you'll have less at a time when you need more, like for healthcare.
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Chapter 5: What advice does personal finance expert Michelle Singletary offer about retirement fears?
Are there resources available for people who don't have as much saved? There's two places I really recommend people to go. First of all, it's AARP. They have a whole section on their website for retiring, retiring in place, long-term care information, how to do your estate planning. And then also your local aging office.
It has a tremendous amount of resources for those who may not have enough, who have housing insecurity or food insecurity. And then hopefully you're connected to some community group, whether it's through your faith or some other group. Get connected in your community because there are some resources that can help you, but you won't know if you're not connected.
Financial advice can admittedly be a little frustrating because I think we hear the same thing over and over again, you know, like sit tight, stay the course, don't make any rash decisions. What do you say to people who feel antsy right now who want a different answer than what they usually hear? Yeah.
So this happens a lot. People want, they ask you a question and they really have already reined up their mind. They want you to co-sign on a bad situation. Listen, good advice is good advice no matter what. And people want a microwave answer to a problem that need to be baked in the oven. And so you can't microwave your way away from situations like we're going right now. You just can't.
We know by history, that's how we look at things. You know, the market eventually returns, historically. Could it change in the future? Sure it can. But we have decades and decades of data that show that when we go into an economic downturn, we come out. It's in everybody's interest that that happens. And you have to feel what you need to feel.
I will not tell you not to panic when the market goes down. I will not tell you that because it is human to be mad and angry and upset and scared. Be all of those. Just don't make decisions in that moment.
So depending on a lot of different factors, some of us may be in the workforce longer than we anticipated, or we may have to go back on the job market after we've left it. How can generations work together in the workplace? Stay tuned.
Okay, so we heard from a lot of you about your concerns around 401ks, but we also got a call from Marsha in Oklahoma who had another kind of concern about her generation.
So I am about to turn 70 and was requested to apply for and hired for a job of some significance. I think. And prior to this, I've always been one who thought by the age of 70, you were irrelevant in the workplace. So what I'm interested in hearing is how does the workforce view boomers in the workplace?
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Chapter 6: How can you effectively talk to elders about retirement and finances?
Oh, I'm like, don't talk about Marsha that way.
I just wondered if today's workforce, which certainly in this administration where I'm working, skis younger, which is great, what feelings they harbor about having to carry older workers, you know, on their shoulders?
That's a great question. And it shows, you know, great self-awareness and humility. My initial reaction is, don't be too worried.
We posed Marsha's question to Professor Bobby Duffy. He lives across the pond where he studies generational differences at the Policy Institute at King's College London.
There is definitely a more general perception that boomers are generally greedy. The kind of theme is a sense of selfishness. And for the younger generations, like Gen Z... The most entitled generation, the most difficult generation in the workplace, that they can't be bothered to check emails, having breakdowns about the difficulty of a nine-to-five job.
You can go all the way back to the Industrial Revolution where things were changing fast and there was a sense that younger generations had a better understanding of the technology that was coming through. Older generations were becoming a bit obsolete.
But I think it's worse today in many ways because we also do have a much more stereotypical view through our social media and media environment of what are the very exaggerated technologies view of the differences between the generations or the characters of individual generations.
You studied how much these stereotypes hold up in reality. What data were you collecting and where from?
What I do is I look at very long-term surveys going back to 50s and 60s. So really big studies like the General Social Survey in the US, massive annual study that gives you measures of all different aspects of attitudes and behaviours. And the key thing is to do it over a long enough term so you can see that this is something to do with this particular generation being different.
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Chapter 7: What should people prioritize financially during economic uncertainty?
Did you find that these generational stereotypes hold up to reality?
No. Very often they don't at all. The gap between young and old today is very similar to the gap between young and old in the past. So baby boomers were also much more comfortable with different changing social norms when they were young compared to their parents and grandparents.
And grandparents, in fact, when I look across decades of this data, there is no particularly big divide between young and old today compared to the past. Although it feels like that partly because our media or social media really emphasize and exaggerate the differences between the generations.
Who does that myth-making serve?
it kind of refers back to firstly the change in our information environment and particularly in media and social media boomers really are the most out of touch and entitled generation there is and it's not even close sick day okay you're you don't sound terrible um do you mind just turning on your camera so i can see that you're actually sick
I think that context of we've created this information environment where these are shorthand labels for stereotypes does get, does imbue itself into our general understanding of these generations and that leaks into the workplace.
Gen Z at work. Of course I'm closing my laptop at 5 p.m. on the dot.
I'm a Gen Z in corporate. What do you mean, what is a mental health day? Figure it out because I'm taking one a month. Sorry.
I just worked eight hours and you expect me to go make dinner right now?
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