PBS - Frontline - The Retirement Gamble

[SheilaT]

2. Interesting.

Do note that there was never a Golden Age when all workers had a guaranteed pension.

At the beginning they say that in 1970 42% of employees had a pension. That's noticeably less than half of the workforce.
And I'm thinking that may be an artificially high number.

There's this pleasant myth that in the 1950's and 60's all companies were benevolently offering pensions and that the vast majority of workers stuck around to collect them. The reality is somewhat different.

I went to work in 1969, at the tender age of 20, for a company that had a pension plan. I don't recall all the details so many years later, but I do recall that you had to be at least 25 and had to have worked for the company some minimum length of time (three years? two? five? Don't remember.) to get enrolled. And then you'd need another ten years to be vested in the plan. For reasons I've never understood, after I'd been there a year the company dropped the age and minimum employment and I was automatically enrolled. They also did away with the employee contribution at the time.

I am finally starting the paperwork to collect my small pension. I stayed at that company for ten and a half years, and I'll be getting less than $200 per month. Fortunately, I don't have to try to live on that. I'm still working, and I'll probably start collecting Social Security in a year or two while I continue to work until I'm about 70.

While 401k plans are a whole different thing than the defined benefit pension, that pension wasn't always as wonderful as people want to think it was. Not a lot of people retired to live in luxury.

One thing that's never really talked about is how much more cash it takes these days for the basic necessities. Like a computer. Connected to the internet. A cell phone. Cable TV. It's certainly possible to do without those things, but they're now a basic part of our lives in the way that a rotary dial phone was fifty years ago. I'm not blaming people for their financial reversals, but we all need to take a clear look at the very many changes that have taken place over the past half century, and it encompasses a whole lot more than just the promise (and the broken promise at that) of 401k plans.