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    The Forces Shaping Retirement in the 2020s

    by Catherine Siskos Sep 28, 2021 6 minutes
    Concept art with a clock and a stack of coins.

    This is the decade when retirement gets redefined. The era of trading a long career for a pension, a gold watch and afternoons on the golf course ended long ago. In its place, today's retirees face growing financial pressure from multiple directions, including the looming fiscal crises for Social Security and Medicare.

    The remedies for these financial pressures can sometimes exacerbate economic divisions. Retirement for the middle or working class is changing more than retirement for the wealthy. "There are already different levels of retirement," says Jason Schenker, an economist and chairman of The Futurist Institute.

    That imbalance starts with retirement savings. Although a robust stock market helped turn a record 334,000 people into 401(k) millionaires by the end of 2020, one in three Americans also report that the pandemic set their savings back a few years, according to a Fidelity Investments survey. Americans in their 50s had, on average, $203,600 stashed away. That's not chump change, but it's hardly enough to retire on.

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