With rising costs of higher education it is becoming increasingly harder to find a major and potential career that will keep you out of the red upon graduation. If you take a few minutes to peruse the net finding cases of students who owe up to 200k by the end of the education costs, you’ll start to wonder just how college students today (and in recent years) will ever retire with a run-of-the-mill middle class job. The answer is, you can’t.
Typically you graduate and earn just enough money to pay your bills, buy a house, have a couple of kids, and then bust your butt trying to make ends meet. So in that cycle, it is hard to find enough money to invest or even save for retirement. At that rate you’ll be able to retire at the ripe age of 90.
The thought that Social Security will be around for their retirement is something they should not count on, at least at this point, and will have to invest regularly to make up for it. Investing in the stock market via mutual funds or otherwise is also a gamble in the sense that you’ll have to get quite a return on your investment to live off in your elder years considering you’ll be paying off a house and student loans for at least 10-30 years.
The recent surge in entrepreneurship I think is a direct result of this fact. You can’t save or invest enough to dream of retiring so in order to inspire hope of retirement you’ll have to find an alternative.