Why Gen X is uniquely suited to handle bad retirement prospects

These days, you can’t swing a vintage pair of Doc Martens without hitting a new study or article describing why Gen X won’t live up to its retirement potential.

Prudential warned us in 2023 that more than a third of Gen Xers had less than $10k in retirement savings. In 2024, Natixis Investments found that 48% of Gen Xers said it would take a miracle for them to retire securely (up from only 41% of Generation X counting on divine intervention as of 2021).

Even the much-lauded great wealth transfer—the $124 trillion in assets that baby boomers will pass along to their heirs by the year 2048—will largely skip over Gen X. The wealth management firm Cerulli Associates anticipates that millennials will be the biggest beneficiaries of the wealth transfer, inheriting $46 trillion over the next 25 years.

While none of this is good news, Gen X has been preparing for this challenge our entire lives. As the generational “middle child,” we Gen Xers have spent our lives quietly taking care of ourselves, figuring out new technology as it appeared, and basically getting on with it while everyone else bickered amongst themselves.

Here’s how the Gen X core competencies, which we’ve honed over decades, will allow us to seize a secure retirement from the jaws of financial instability.

Gen X is known for self-reliance

Since elementary school, we have known we have to take care of things on our own.

In our youth, American society wrung their collective hands over parents’ “abandonment” of latchkey kids. Not only did TV stations air guilt-tripping PSAs about what kinds of drug use we were up to while Mom was working late, but columnists also bemoaned the fate of lonely, frightened children coming home to empty houses.

Meanwhile, educational, medical, and psychological journals found that the lack of supervision didn’t seem to harm latchkey kids. Instead of falling into drug use à la Go Ask Alice, most of us learned to independently handle homework, chores, and little siblings.

Being left unsupervised after school was just the start of the Gen X trend of self-reliance. We also came of age at the same time pensions disappeared, meaning we were left to our own devices to navigate a new world of retirement planning.

The IRS had just introduced defined contribution retirement plans (i.e., 401(k) plans) as the eldest Gen Xers joined the workforce, meaning there was no map or precedent available to guide us. It’s little wonder that Gen X didn’t necessarily start contributing to retirement right away.

Creating a latchkey retirement

We may have learned self-reliance because we had to—both when we were responsible for starting dinner after school and funding our own retirement after pensions went poof—but that skill will continue to serve us as we face an uncertain retirement.

Since we know we can only count on ourselves, we can tap into that quiet, competent independence we are known for to make retirement work.

That starts by looking at what you can do to lower your costs and increase your income to help you set aside more money for retirement. For many Gen Xers, the answer is entrepreneurship. A recent survey by ZenBusiness found that 40% of Gen X respondents plan to start or have already launched a business as part of their retirement plan.

Even if the idea of being a small business owner gives you hives, making a personal financial plan that puts the power in your hands can help you feel in control.

Gen X is known for tech savviness

Millennials and Gen Z may be digital natives, but Gen Xers were the kids who were around when the technology was new.

This gives us a better-than-native perspective since we not only remember the breathless optimism of every new technological advancement (remember when we thought computers were magic?) but we also have had the dubious privilege of troubleshooting misbehaving tech until we have a clearer understanding of its real uses and limitations.

This means we embrace new technologies as they appear, but keep hold of our skepticism about their potential usefulness until we’ve seen it for ourselves. (We’re also the ones who have to tell our kids and our parents not to get taken in by AI slop.)

Troubleshoot your retirement

Because we were lucky enough to live through the tech boom of our youth, we are comfortable with technology and we have the patience to learn how to use it, rather than simply assume it will work without our input. (Digital natives have never had to blow on a Nintendo game cartridge and it shows.)

AI is the “technology is magic” du jour, and our generation is skeptical about the promises that it will increase productivity, replace professional workers, and even make julienne fries. But we learned to use personal computers, even though they can’t actually create Kelly LeBrock out of magazine images. So we can make large language models and large reasoning models work for us, even though they can’t replace human thinking.

Specifically, Gen X may want to consider using AI to help with budgeting. In addition to apps that use AI to help you budget, you can also ask chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude.ai for help. If you’re comfortable doing so, this could mean giving the chatbot your monthly income and expenses and asking for help creating a budget or savings strategies. Alternatively, you could ask open-ended questions like:

• I need to contribute more money to my 401(k). How can I find some money in my monthly budget to send to my retirement accounts?
• I currently spend $600 per month on groceries. What are some ways to reduce that amount by 20%?
• My energy bills last winter averaged $250 per month. How can I reduce my costs to $175 per month?

As with any AI response, you will need to make sure you double check the answers to make sure they’re not an AI hallucination. But using these models to help you see different financial options is a good way to embrace the real opportunities offered by AI.

It’s not slacking when you get the job done

Generation X were labeled as slackers for a number of reasons. Our priorities were different from those of our parents, which the establishment saw as laziness. Pensions went extinct when we started working, so our dearth of retirement savings seemed like a lack of foresight on our part. We learned early on not to count on anyone but ourselves, which can look like not being a team player.

But Gen Xers have never been slackers at any point in our lives, least of all as we look toward retirement. We’re former latchkey kids who know how to create an independent plan to take care of ourselves. That may mean entrepreneurship or simply taking the reins of retirement planning. We’re tech savvy digital troubleshooters who understand the limitations of new technologies and use them creatively throughout our lives. Currently, that means harnessing the power of AI to help identify ways to set aside more money for retirement.

We are the quiet, cynical, creative, competent generation. It would be a mistake to underestimate us.

View the full article