The survey reveals that 61% of us are more afraid of running out of money than we are of dying itself.
Life insurance firm Allianz, which performed the survey, found the result remarkable, but actually it sort of makes sense. It sucks sometimes, but you don t know about it.
Is being broke and old is not the same.
The study was based on a survey of 1,000 middle-class Americans who are aged 25 and over. The survey found that either singles or married couples had $150,000 or more of investable assets, or incomes of $50,000 a year if single and $75,000 a year if married. The danger of outliving your money, and end up poor and old, is why Social Security is so crucial to everyone but the very rich - even to those who have saved wisely all their lives. It's an inflation-adjusted lifetime annuity that never runs out.
It is also why most financial experts encourage us to buy single premium immediate annuities when we retire, if not before. These convert a lump sum the single premium paid up front into a regular monthly income that will last for the rest of your life, whether you live for a month or 40 years.
The main problem of most single-premium immediate annuities is that they don t include costs of living adjustments, so your monthly income buys less and less over time.
In a testament to our volatile modern era, 56% of thosesurveyed said they now consider regular financial crises as an integral part of their retirement planning. 46% said their retirement planning had been derailed by the most recent crisis, which has been rolling since March 2020.
The people most hit hardest, it seems, are Generation X, which might also be called The Forgotten Generation or the Overlooked Generation, sandwiched between the high-profile boomers and millennials.
The three generations of Gen X have the lowest overall financial confidence among the three generations, Allianz said. This may not be surprising, as many were Walloped with not one but three major crises in the first 20 years of their working lives - the recession of the early 1990s, the crash of 2000 - 3 and the global financial crisis of 2007 - 9.
They are the generation now on deck for retirement. The oldest are about to turn 59 this year. The youngest are entering their mid-40s, some 25 percent tell Allianz they still have time to save - down from 43% just two years ago.
Plus, over the years, 40% tell Allianz they don t have a retirement plan and 56% say they don t know where to start planning, beyond having basic accounts like a 401 k and an IRA.
Having those accounts, and saving the maximum into both accounts annually, is a good place to start.