Retirement Crisis Quotes

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your f**kin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end.

You can imagine, if somebody's approaching retirement, and all of a sudden the funds that he or she is depending on is depleted by 50% or however many, it gives them a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach.

But with a rate of return of 1.6 percent or less, or a negative rate of return, our children and our grandchildren, if we do not make changes, will in fact not have a secure retirement. Indeed, they will not have the funds when they go to retire to even minimally get by.

We have so many people retiring that we do not have enough people paying into the system to be able to provide the benefits for those collecting those benefits.

Our nation's Social Security Trust Fund is depleting at an alarming rate, and failure to implement immediate reforms endangers the ability of Americans to plan for their retirement with the options and certainty they deserve.

Throughout the Great Recession of 2008, the average 401(k) balance lost anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of value. Nobody was more harmed than baby boomers or recent retirees, who, unlike younger workers, didn't have the time for the market to rebound or were no longer contributing and therefore unable to invest when stocks were cheap.

Our society has changed in unforeseeable ways since Social Security was created. For example, we are living longer, healthier, and more productive lives and while this is all great news, this has also placed added pressure on America's retirement system.

The issue of the pension gap has got to become visible and important to millions of people before Washington will respond seriously. Right now, everyone thinks it's his or her own problem and that individuals have to do better and save more. Of course, that is true. We all have to save more and take responsibility for our own retirement. But we have a huge social and economic problem on our hands.

Saving enough to retire has become impossible for most Americans.

The 'aha' moment came one to me one morning when I was applying my mascara, and I realized that the retirement crisis is actually a woman's crisis: Women live longer than men yet retire with less money.

At 33 years old, I didn't have to work anymore. I had to search through 'What am I going to do for the rest of my life?' I wasn't ready to fly-fish for the rest of my life.

The retirement financial crisis will affect far more people than baby boomers, and certainly it will affect their children. Most of the retirees and near-retirees with whom we talked, said that they were extremely reluctant to have to depend on their children financially, or to think of moving in with their children. But the mere fact that they were discussing those issues indicates that some of them have already figured out that that is what lies ahead for them.

A whole generation of Americans will retire in poverty instead of prosperity, because they simply are not preparing for retirement now.

He died right after he retired, and seeing that made me feel more conscious of a man needing a motive to live. If I ever got out of coaching, I would have to get a job somewhere, or I'm afraid I'd wilt on the vine, too.

We need to expand Social Security to prevent the looming retirement crisis, and we can do it simply by asking billionaires to pay their fair share.

Today, over half of American workers have less than $10,000 in savings and have no idea how they will be able to retire with any shred of dignity.

There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that's spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.

People clinging to job security, savings, retirement plans, and other relics will be the ones financially-ravaged from 2010-2020, the most volatile world-changing decade in history.

I went to work when I was a young fellow and I loved what I did. And I just kept working. And when I decided that maybe the time had come for me to quit, I got depressed. What could I do if I didn't work?

The children of baby boomers should take very seriously the consequences for them of the inadequate funding for them of the baby boomer generation. This is a huge economic problem for the nation, not just for individuals or individual families. Think about it for a minute - if retirees become 20% of our population and their purchasing power falls below what has been normal for retirees in the past, one important engine driving our economy will be diminished.

With or without a Social Security fix, Americans don't have enough assets to retire on. There has to be a much larger debate.

Well, the big elephant in the whole system is the baby boomer generation that marches through like a herd of elephants. And we begin to retire in 2008.

If the experts are right in their calculations, then we face the prospect of millions of people retiring into poverty from the American middle class in the years ahead. That has all kinds of social and economic consequences. We need to anticipate those and start tackling the problem in a constructive way.

Years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement [Lyndon Johnson] could find no solace in family, in recreation, in sports or in hobbies. It was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it.