subject: Retirement Preparedness And Net Worth Statistics For Men [print this page] We covered some stats concerning how unprepared women are for retirement in a previous post, but what about average single men? Data from the Federal Reserve suggests, you guessed it, men, and especially minority men, are extremely under-funded for retirement too.
Were expounding on one of our previous articles covering some statistics concerning how on average, women earning less than men throughout their working lives are less prepared to retire as comfortably or even at the same time as men their same age. We looked at the average net worth of single women, African-American women, and Hispanic women at the required social security retirement age of 65, and suggested that women are under-funded to maintain their current quality of life throughout retirement.
In this article, were going to focus on the same set of data and statistics, released and updated by the Federal Reserve, for 65 year old men. While its true that men on average earn more than women, these numbers, which suggest African-American and Hispanic men are also unprepared for retirement, arent pretty either.
The median net worth of single white men at age 65 is about $31,150. If this number seems robust, consider this: in order to maintain the same quality of life in retirement that people enjoy throughout their working lives, retirees should aim to replace about 80% of their pre-retirement income somehow. For those who are near or preparing for retirement, thats no easy task. For the average median income earner who pulls in $37,000 a year, social security alone will replace only about 30-40% of that pre-retirement income.
And the reliability of social security itself is under fire from critics who say the system is flawed. Implemented as an experiment in 1935, the Social Security Act aimed to protect Americans from social disabilities in exchange for a lifetime of work and paycheck deductions. But over the last 75 years, a lot has changed, and the insurance structure that social security was founded upon has been compromised by inflation and booming fiscal deficits.
The outlook is grim for African-American and Hispanic men, too; by age 65, single black men have created themselves a modest $7,900 and $9,730 median net worth, respectively. Add to that the economic environment and jobs outlook, and the likeliness that minorities will be prepared for retirement nearly fizzles away completely. While the national unemployment rate lingers above 9% for the last 18 months, the unemployment for black males is a staggering 16.3%.
Thats a scary trend for those that are near or approaching retirement, because the job market in every industry is barely showing faint signs of life, even after a year and a half. At the time of this writing, just last month brought the biggest jump in unemployment, with the economy adding a mere 40,000 private sector jobs triggering a .02% increase, to a national unemployment average of 9.6%.
Although its true men hold unfair workplace advantages over women (average wages are higher, men rarely leave the job market to raise children like women do, and despite equal opportunity laws, men get promoted more often than women), retirement is still a murky uncertainty for the average 65 year old man. Owning a home can boost a retirees net worth if theres enough equity built into the home after years of mortgage payments, and homeowners can now tap that equity with a reverse mortgage, an increasingly popular transaction as retirement dangles further and further out of reach. http://www.legacyreversemortgage.com/reverse-mortgage-calculator
by: Jim Cory
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