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Chris Branaman jokes that his retirement plan is a blue vest and a Walmart name tag. At 53, the Michigan IT worker has about $100,000 saved for retirement, an amount he knows won’t stretch through his sixties and beyond. “That’s my funny way of saying I will likely be working in retirement,” he said. Branaman is one of millions of Gen Xers now staring down a retirement they cannot actually afford to take.
Gen Xers, now between 46 and 61 years old, entered the workforce just as employers walked away from pensions in favor of 401(k) plans. In the 1970s, roughly half of private-sector workers had a pension guaranteeing steady income for life. Today only about 14% do. The shift quietly handed workers full responsibility for saving and investing, a job most were never trained to do.
The numbers show how badly that experiment has gone. Gen Xers have saved a median of just $107,000 for retirement, according to a 2025 Transamerica Institute study. Yet the same generation believes it will need roughly $700,000 to retire comfortably. That gap sits at the center of a growing dread, one that’s spreading fast as the oldest Gen Xers turn 62 next year, the earliest age to claim Social Security.
41% of Older Workers Now Expect Social Security to Cover Most of Their Retirement
About 41% of U.S. workers over 55 now expect Social Security to be their main source of retirement income, up sharply from 32% a year earlier, according to a survey from financial firm NFP. That figure dwarfs the 26% of the same age group who expect 401(k)s, IRAs, and other savings accounts to carry them through their later years.
“That’s really a warning light,” Jessica Espinoza, NFP’s managing director and national practice leader for retirement, told CBS News. She said the workers now approaching retirement age are the first generation forced to rely almost entirely on their own savings, without a pension to fall back on. Whether they can retire “on their own terms,” she said, is genuinely uncertain for a huge share of them.
Social Security was built to cover just one leg of a three-legged retirement stool, alongside pensions and personal savings, replacing about 40% of a worker’s income according to the National Council on Aging. With pensions gone for most Gen Xers, that stool now has two legs: Social Security and whatever sits in a 401(k). For a program never designed to carry that weight, a bigger test is coming.
2032: The Year Social Security Could Cut Every Check by 22%
Social Security’s retirement trust fund is projected to run dry by the end of 2032, according to the program’s 2026 trustees report. At that point, incoming payroll tax revenue would cover only about 78% of promised benefits, triggering an automatic 22% cut for the more than 70 million Americans who receive a monthly check. Most retirement experts still expect Congress to act before that happens, but nothing is guaranteed.
For Branaman, the possibility is not abstract. “Then it becomes: am I living in a house, an apartment, a van down by the river?” he said. “You really have to keep all options on the table and be open to adapting to that moment.” He is already budgeting for a future where his monthly Social Security check buys noticeably less than it does today.
Joshua, a 54-year-old IT administrator in Tennessee who asked that his last name be withheld, feels the squeeze already, before any cut has even happened. “We were buying groceries for $120 a week,” he said. “Now if you go into the grocery store, it’s $250.” He added that his wages haven’t come close to keeping pace: “The entire tide has risen, but wages haven’t risen to keep up with it.”
For Many Gen Xers, Retirement Now Means “Figure It Out”
Workers over 50 are often told to lean on catch-up contributions, an IRS provision letting them save an extra $8,000 a year beyond the standard limit. J. Ashley Renfroe, a 401(k) plan administrator, said that advice rarely reaches the people who need it most. “The only people doing catch-up contributions are owners and shareholders in those businesses. The only other ones are very high earners,” he said, adding his own paycheck doesn’t leave room for it either.
Some Gen Xers are trying to break the cycle for their kids. A 61-year-old Los Angeles woman, now drawing down her retirement fund after a layoff, said no one ever taught her how to save. She has made sure her own daughter won’t say the same thing. Renfroe, meanwhile, is helping cover his daughter’s college costs so she can start adulthood without student debt, even if it slows his own savings for years.
Joshua summed up what so many in his generation now believe: “I’m going to have to figure this thing out on my own, which is a very Gen X thing.” It’s the same phrase Branaman used to describe the 401(k) system he was handed decades ago: figure it out. That system never came with a safety net, and the generation raised to trust it is now the one finding out, in real time, just how thin the net was.