Savvify

1. Roughly half of all working Americans don’t participate in a retirement plan or don’t have an employer-sponsored plan in which to participate.

2. A huge number of adult Americans - by one estimate 150 million of a potential 200 million - aren’t saving for retirement in any meaningful way, if at all.

3. Dave Ramsey, a personal-finance expert and talk-radio host, cited a recent poll in which 80 percent of Americans said they believed their standard of living would go up at retirement.

4. “Our culture today tells us that we deserve to have everything we want because we can charge it,” Dave Ramsey says. “Previous generations thought you could only have something if you could pay for it. Their lifestyles were much simpler, and retirement was a time to simplify even more.”

5. Many Americans are counting on Social Security has helped lower cases of poverty among the elderly in the USA, but it stands on unstable financial ground.

6. The average total income for those 65 and older in America is $25,610, and the median is a meager $16,770, according to EBRI Notes, a publication of the Employee Benefit Research Institute. That means retirees are living on roughly one-third of their pre-retirement incomes. And that’s a far cry from the 70% to 80% that income replacement experts suggest Americans need to maintain their pre-retirement standards of living.