How much money have 60-year-old Americans saved on average for retirement?
With retirement not far away, are those who are blowing out sixty candles on their birthday cake on track to retire comfortably? Here’s what the data says…
Americans on average retire in their 60s which means by the time they’re blowing out five dozen candles on their birthday cake their retirement plan better be in order. However, twelve percent of Americans over the age of sixty have no nest egg to speak of according to Federal Reserve data.
Researchers from the central bank found that only 34 percent of those between the age of 45 and 59 were on track with their retirement savings. While the amount that you need going into your golden years varies depending on where you live, the average expenditure of Americans over 65 exceeds the average Social Security benefit paid out.
How much money have 60-year-old Americans saved on average for retirement?
Vanguard’s “How America Saves 2023″ report, while it doesn’t provide the average savings of sixty-year-olds specifically, it found that the cohort between 55 and 64 held an average of around $208,000. The mean amount, fifty percent hold a larger balance and fifty percent a smaller balance, was less than $71,200.
That was considerably less than what the investment management company’s 2022 survey found, over $256,000 and less than $90,000 respectively. This could explain why Federal Reserve Board reported a nine-percentage-point drop between 2021 and 2022 to 31 percent of Americans feeling they were not on track with their retirement savings.
How much should you have saved at age 60 for retirement?
Vital factors to consider when planning for retirement include cost of living, income and life expectancy when deciding how much to save. In order to accumulate sufficient savings, experts set goal posts for where you should more or less be at any given age.
For those who are 60 years old, the experts at T. Rowe Price told US News & World Report Money they recommend between 5.5 and 11 times your salary to be on track for retirement. According to Bank of America’s Financial Wellness Tracker, you should have 7.6 times your annual salary. And according to Fidelity Investments, eight times your annual salary.