"I'm Going to Have to Work Until I Die."

Diane Weiss and Kristen Svihlik live 1,700 miles and a generation apart. Weiss, 60, is twice divorced with a grown daughter, and resides by herself in a one-bedroom apartment in Mesa, Arizona. Svihlik is 38 and lives in a fixer-upper in Akron, Ohio, with her husband, their 6-year-old son, and a newborn daughter. The two women have never met, but they uttered precisely the same words to me on the exact same day: “I’m going to have to work until I die.”

It’s not an uncommon sentiment in America today, where a relative few have enough money socked away to see them comfortably through the so-called golden years. The Federal Reserve’s latest survey of consumer finances shows that among the poorest 50 percent of families, less than a third participated in a tax-subsidized retirement plan in 2019, while 91 percent of families in the wealthiest 10 percent did. The data excludes traditional company pensions, which have been increasingly replaced by “defined contribution” plans