In a Front Line full documentary, the question is addressed:

Can you afford to retire?

The documentary starts off with the following words

“For the baby boomer generation there’s trouble ahead,

workers are going to retire into despair and run out of money. “

One individual that was interviewed said the following:

“The reality of retirement is starting to sink in.  I thought when I retired, it was going to be a lot different. “

“Instead it’s scary as hell. The hardest thing is not knowing if I’ll be able to retire “

Throughout the documentary, these kind of comments are heard from several different people who are unsure of whether they’ll ever be able to retire .

The big problem is the decline of corporate pensions .

This is a story we could tell anywhere in America but in the documentary it begins in Lincoln Nebraska.

It’s a Monday morning where  people in their 50s are getting the word on how to prepare for retirement. These people have 401(k) type plans and they’re in for a wake up call.

The expert on the 401k plan says:

“I have some bad news for everyone in the room .

Americans are not saving enough money for retirement. There’s a lot of people that are my age that are really going to have a very nasty surprise in about the next 10 years .

One person who is interviewed said “when I saw how much money I was going to need to maintain my standard of living after I retired that was quite an epiphany for me that day “.

The narrator of the Frontline documentary said:

“for many Americans it used to be that your employer took care of your retirement.”

Now Corporations have put the responsibility and much of the cost on their employees.

The pension system has changed dramatically , people aren’t going to have pensions like they used to where they get a benefit for the rest of their lives.

People are going to retire basically with 401(k) plans and that’s all.”

The problem is that the baby boomer generation is finding itself “long on life expectancy and short on income”.

How many of you seen somebody already at retirement age working at Walmart  or  Carls Junior.

This isn’t what they’ve chosen to do now do, they’re there because they have to be working to pay the bills.

Experts agree that this is a crisis in the making.

The question is, how did the boomer generation get into this fix? It’s not something that happened overnight.

The story of this unfolded over several  decades.

Before our parents could expect a lifetime of work at a major company would be rewarded with a lifetime pension, but for most that is no longer the case.

Please watch the documentary to see how the 401k retirement plan has contributed to the problem.