Why Your Retirement Savings Never Feel Like Enough

You've worked for decades to reach the financial position you're in now, and the number in your head can still feel far out of reach. What you saved and what you believe you should have saved were never the same kind of number. The first is a number you can find on a statement. The second likely came from financial advice, conversations with friends or headlines about how much money people need to retire comfortably.

In 2026, one of those headline figures was $1.46 million. That's the "magic number" for retiring comfortably that came out of a survey of a few thousand Americans by the insurance company Northwestern Mutual, released in April on a day the company calls "401K Day."

That number measured what people thought retirement would cost them. It is only one instance where an ideal savings number becomes a benchmark based on beliefs and expectations, with little connection to what anyone has actually saved.

In 2008, the financial company ING built a whole advertising campaign around this very idea. Its television ads showed ordinary people going about their days with enormous numbers and dollar signs beside them, representing their retirement savings targets.

In one ad the next year, a man's "large, bright orange retirement number" is "run over by a truck, caught in a subway door, bitten by a dog, and even torched on a hibachi grill." The ads were funny because they were true. Once you have a number, it can be surprisingly difficult to shake.

In an experiment published in 1974, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman asked participants to estimate what share of the countries in the United Nations were in Africa. Before answering, the participants watched a wheel marked from 0 to 100 spin and stop at a number.

The wheel had nothing to do with the question. Yet people who saw the wheel stop at 10 tended to give lower estimates than those who saw it stop at 65: the typical guess was 25%, against 45%. The experiment showed that an initial number has influence over judgments that follow, even when this number has no meaningful connection to the question being asked. Tversky and Kahneman called this effect anchoring.

Retirement savings targets tend to work in the same way. A figure we hear in a conversation or read in a headline can become the number we measure ourselves against, even if it doesn't represent what people actually have saved.

So how many people your age have $1.46 million saved for retirement? Not many. In our count from the Federal Reserve's latest Survey of Consumer Finances, which tracks what American families actually have, only around 8 in 100 families headed by someone aged 55 or older have at least that much in retirement accounts.

The majority (88 in 100) have less than $1 million, including the 47 in 100, almost half, who have no retirement account at all. Money held in accounts such as 401(k) plans and IRAs was included in this count. Traditional pension or Social Security benefits were not counted in these accounts.

The figures look very different for single women aged 55 and older. Only 37 in 100 have a retirement account, and fewer than 3 in 100 have $1 million or more in one.

Retirement accounts aren't the only place people keep money, so we also counted everything families own, minus their debts, not counting the primary home. By that count, about 19 in 100 families headed by someone aged 55 or older have at least $1.46 million. Among families in their 60s, the typical one has about $180,000.

That figure hides two very different groups. In their 60s, the typical family with a retirement account has about $657,000 in all, not counting the primary home. The typical family without one has about $18,000. Traditional pensions and Social Security still aren't counted.

These numbers don't indicate whether every household has enough to retire comfortably. They do, however, put the $1.46 million figure in perspective: it is not a balance most older households have reached.

This difference between target and reality has a history, most of which happened during your working life. Nowadays, you can't bring up retirement without discussing a 401(k) or an IRA. But these accounts weren't always a standard part of working life.

Traditional workplace pensions weren't as widespread as many people remember. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 38% of private-sector wage and salary workers in 1979 had one. This was before the 401(k) was even around.

The 401(k), now one of the best-known ways to save for retirement in the U.S., only became possible after a provision was added to the tax code in 1978. It came into effect in 1980, and it took time for employers to introduce these plans.

Ted Benna, then at a firm called The Johnson Companies, had an idea for how employees could save from their paychecks, with employers able to contribute too. When his client turned it down, his own firm decided to give it a try, and its plan started in January 1981. The IRS proposed rules for these plans that November. If you're 70 today, you were about 25 that year. If you're 80, you were about 35, with years of work already behind you.

Still, the accounts spread slowly. By 1989, only 37% of American families had any kind of retirement account.

Benna later challenged the idea that everyone once had access to a pension: "There is a widely held perception that we once had a wonderful retirement system where all employees received a pension."

Most of today's retirees spent years in the workforce before some of these accounts even existed, and many never had a workplace pension. Measured against a seven-figure savings target, their retirement accounts may look inadequate. But that comparison leaves out the history behind those balances. The gap is a reflection of how the retirement system has changed, not a verdict on you.

The whole purpose of a retirement account is to offer security for when you're out of the workplace, but a balance doesn't show whether you own a home, how you manage living expenses or how much money you can expect to come in each month.

For many older Americans, the most important number isn't the balance in a retirement account. It's the Social Security payment that arrives each month.

Federal Reserve economists looked at working households born between 1951 and 1960, using 2013 data. For the typical household in the lower-income half, future Social Security checks were worth about $172,000 in 2013 dollars, counted as if they were money in the bank. By comparison, the typical household in that group had just $6,500 in pensions and retirement accounts combined.

For the lowest-income fifth of Americans aged 65 and older, Social Security provided 83% of their income in 2019. This is according to the Congressional Research Service, cited by Alicia Munnell of Boston College's Center for Retirement Research. "It is doing its job," she wrote. Our explainer on the average Social Security check shows how yours is figured.

Retirement resources don't all sit in an account you can check on a statement.

The Fed's survey shows that among families headed by someone 65 to 74, approximately 80% own their home, with or without a mortgage. Homeownership doesn't automatically mean financial security. Owners still need to pay property taxes, insurance, maintenance and other expenses. But if you own your home outright, your housing costs will be very different from those of someone paying rent, even if your retirement savings are similar.

There's no secret combination of Social Security, savings and homeownership. People rely on different combinations of income, housing and personal support to get by in retirement.

When The Wall Street Journal wrote about her in January 2024, Joyce McKiney was 77 and lived in Philadelphia on about $1,800 a month in Social Security. After her husband passed away, she sold her home and moved into low-income senior housing. Her rent was $584. She gave up her car and landline and rode a senior shuttle for a dollar a ride.

She also found a regular place to spend her weekdays at a local senior center, where she could have coffee, eat lunch and spend time with friends. "Many of the people here are now like an extended family to me," she told the Journal.

The Journal's story also followed Kathy Rote, then 73, who lived in Tucson on a monthly Social Security check of $1,040. She was able to buy a home with the inheritance she received from her uncle, and this is where she occasionally hosted friends on her patio. "We sing songs and eat some food and talk about what really matters to each of us," she said.

Neither story is about reaching a number.

That doesn't mean retirement security isn't a real problem. In 2024, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College estimated that about 2 in 5 working-age households were at risk of being unable to maintain their standard of living in retirement.

Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute has argued that the retirement crisis is overstated, in part because having no retirement account doesn't necessarily mean having no retirement resources: pensions count, too.

Yes, a $1.46 million balance is impressive. It's what people believe they need. The more meaningful number is different for everyone, because it is built from your own income, expenses, savings and circumstances. The other one compares you with a crowd of people your age who all have $1.46 million put away. For most people your age, that crowd was never there.

Sources

• Federal Reserve, "Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2022 to 2025: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances" (October 2026): federalreserve.gov
• Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances 2025, Tables 6 and 9 (retirement accounts and home ownership by age; retirement accounts in 1989): federalreserve.gov
• Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances 2025 public data, used for our own analysis: federalreserve.gov
• Northwestern Mutual, 2026 Planning & Progress Study, conducted by The Harris Poll (April 2026): news.northwesternmutual.com
• ING (now Voya), retirement number campaign, launch (March 2008) and next phase (April 2009): voya.mediaroom.com and voya.mediaroom.com
• Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, "Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases," Science (1974): washington.edu (PDF)
• Employee Benefit Research Institute and Investment Company Institute, Issue Brief 606 (2024), on the 1978 law, its 1980 start and the November 1981 rules: ebri.org
• Christopher Carosa, "Ted Benna's words of wisdom," BenefitsPro (2017), on Ted Benna, the first 401(k) plan and his pension quote: benefitspro.com
• Employee Benefit Research Institute, pension participation of private-sector workers, 1979 to 2017 (2019): ebri.org
• Devlin-Foltz, Henriques and Sabelhaus, "The Role of Social Security in Overall Retirement Resources," Federal Reserve FEDS Notes (2016): federalreserve.gov
• Alicia H. Munnell, "Here's How Much Americans Rely on Social Security, at All Income Levels," Center for Retirement Research (September 2026), citing Congressional Research Service figures: crr.bc.edu
• Veronica Dagher and Anne Tergesen, "Here's What It's Like to Retire on Almost Nothing but Social Security," The Wall Street Journal (January 2024): wsj.com
• Center for Retirement Research, "The National Retirement Risk Index: An Update from the 2022 SCF" (2024): crr.bc.edu (PDF)
• Andrew G. Biggs, "There's No Retirement Crisis. But Why Do So Many People Think There Is?" American Enterprise Institute (2025): aei.org
• Arcanomy calculation: from the Fed's 2025 survey data, how many families headed by someone 55 or older have no retirement account, less than $1 million, $1.46 million or more, and the groups in the chart; the same for single women 55 and older; median net worth by age, not counting the primary home, including families in their 60s with and without a retirement account, and how many families headed by someone 55 or older have at least $1.46 million on that count; and readers' ages in 1981.