Basics: White male, 28, paying rent while living with his family in their Akron home. He is self-employed in direct sales, making less than $35,000 a year. He considers himself a staunch Libertarian and believes communities work best when there’s less regulation and government in people’s lives.
Retirement? What’s that? Barely out of the starting gate of life, retirement seems awfully far away for this young guy with high ambitions. Still, he’s thought about it.
“A lot of people have high expectations of someone my age, but I’d just like to know what they expect me to start a retirement account with?” he lamented. “It’s not for lack of being a hard worker, but I’m honestly worried about my generation; most companies are loath to offer health insurance, let alone a nice retirement package — and that’s assuming one will even be at a company longer than five years.
“But, truthfully, the demographic that I spend the most time with are people in my age group. So they aren’t really talking about retirement.”
Adjustments to retirement plans. “I do have a mutual fund, which is slowly growing and I try to add money to when I can, but it’s not always easy at this stage in the game. It seems like every penny is already accounted for and I don’t really have anything left over for that.”
Still, if he does have an extra couple of nickels in the golden years of his live, he’ll spend them traveling.
Who was most affected by the ailing economy when it comes to retirement? “Middle to lower class because it does kind of trickle down. The small-business owners have been hit pretty hard, too, so they have to cut back. So that means the younger generation can’t get jobs because they are affected.”
America Today project seeks citizen input
This project opens journalism to a two-way street. In the hope of learning what you’re thinking and getting citizens more involved in our stories, we’ve added an interactive experiment: We are offering you an opportunity to answer some of the same tough questions we are posing to citizens in the America Today series.
In addition to the traditional Ohio.com comment page, the newspaper is partnering with the Civic Commons, an online organization that encourages respectful and informed debate of tough issues from a variety of perspectives and experiences.
Please join the discussion.
How have your thoughts and plans for retirement been affected by the economy? How do you react to these stories?
