More Americans Worried About Not Having Enough for Retirement
Published at | Updated at
Jupiterimages/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Perhaps it’s not so great to be young after all, especially if you’re worried about what things will be like when you’re older.
A new Pew Research Center survey says that about 40 percent of Americans are concerned that they won’t have enough put away in savings when it comes time to retire.
When Pew asked the same question in 2009, about one in four respondents felt that way.
The group feeling the most anxiety aren’t people closer to retirement age — as in the previous Pew survey — but Americans ages 36 to 40, with just over half believing that their nest eggs won’t be sufficient enough to enjoy their golden years. That’s three times the number of younger adults who worried about the same situation three years ago.
To some extent, their fears are justified. Pew found that the median wealth of those 35- to 44-year-olds today is under half of what that same demographic enjoyed in 2001.
Many of the retirement concerns of the young have to do with the unavailability of guaranteed pensions that their older counterparts received, meaning they’ll need to rely more on their own assets to supplement Social Security, which also isn’t as dependable as it once was.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio