Early Retirement May Not be Optional for Twentysomethings

Many of my friends ask me, “why are you worried about retirement already? You’re only 24 and you have more than forty years until your retire!” The truth is that I don’t think we have forty years until retirement and a lot of us will be forced to retire early. In fact, a recent article in Newsweek stated that the current average retirement age is 57. That only gives me 33 years, which still seems like a long time. However, I think in the future the average retirement age will only get lower and here are my reasons.

1. No Job Security — Our generation no longer work at a company for life. I don’t think it means that we are less loyal, but it’s more of a reaction to the profit seeking inhumanity of corporations. There are often mass layoffs and good benefits such as pensions are mostly eliminated. Basically there are no advantages to being an employee for life. I think the only people in the Silicon Valley who have worked for a private company their entire lives are all at Lockheed Martin, and they’re relics of the old economy waiting to cash in on their pensions. The new world order means that we have no job security and one day we may not be able to find a job and be forced to retire.

2. A Growing Population — The United States population is growing fairly slowly right now, but it is expected to increase to around 392 million by 2050. Why does this affect our retirement age? Well, basically in 15 to 20 years our children will enter the work force and compete for the same limited pool of resources and positions. In China many baby boomers are forced to retire at age 50 so that their jobs can be passed down to younger people. You may say that it’s ageism, but I think it actually makes sense because you can’t let millions of young people run around without a purpose. Our skills need to be passed down to our children, and we need to step aside at some point. I think forty five years is way too long for us to hold on to a job because two generations of people will enter the workforce in that time period.

3. Technology Eliminates Jobs — We live in an age where so many things are automated and simplified so that it takes much less people to do a job. For example, my parents are accountants, and they all use software like Excel and Quicken to balance their books these days. However, before these software packages existed people had to do everything by hand. It definitely took many more accountants to run a billion dollar enterprise sixty years ago. I imagine that technology advancements will eliminate a lot more jobs in the future. It’s possible that technology related positions will increase, but if you’ve ever worked in the Silicon Valley you’d know that these jobs are dominated by the under 40 crowd. Additionally, not all of us work in the tech industry so as technology phases out more and more jobs some of us will be forced to retire.

4. Global Competition — Globalization is something a lot of people fight against. Right now, a lot of manufacturing jobs in America have already been outsourced to other countries. Since technology has expedited the delivery of goods and services around the world Americans are competing with the global workforce for business. High end professional jobs are also being outsourced to other countries because their workforces are cheaper. This all means that wages will probably decrease for Americans in the future. In fact, our generation is the first generation where our wages have decreased compared to our parents. This means that we should save as much as we can now before our earning power is further eroded.

5. The Bottom Line of Corporations — Corporations outsource because it is cheaper, and they also hire younger workers because they are cheaper. I have heard of stories of where senior engineers are laid off and replaced with cheaper college grads. Ageism is rampant, and in some cases it’s reasonable. For example, an 80 year old probably isn’t as good of a physical laborer than a 23 year old. However, most of the time corporations want younger workers to pad their own bottomline.

6. The Zenith of a Career – The proverbial “glass ceiling” is reached much quicker by our generation because our parents’ generation is still in charge of the current state of the world well into our middle ages. Generally people work so that they can reach higher places in their career, and if the peak is reached so quickly then work may become meaningless.

This post may seem pessimistic and paint sort of a grim future, but I think it’s what my mom calls “cautious pessimism”. I think it’s highly likely that our generation will need to or be forced to retire as early as 45 to 50 and that only leaves me 20 to 25 years to save for the rest of my life. A lower retirement age coupled with longer life spans mean that our generation needs to save as much as we can during our working years. I am not really worried about retirement because I am taking steps to prepare for it. It’s much better to start preparing for the second half of your life now and not worry about it when you get there. I am also very optimistic about our generation because we may be able to enjoy our lives more if we plan well and retire early. So to my friends, if you haven’t started contributing to your retirement plan you should do it now before it’s too late.

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