Inflation has pulverized Americans’ finances over the last four years, and a new study shows that’s especially true for the nation’s seniors, whose retirement accounts have been walloped.
The losses have been so severe that would-be retirees need to work an extra six years on average before they can hang up their work boots—and they can blame Washington for this financial disaster.
Much of the damage to senior’s retirement accounts has been hidden by the stock market rally of the last several years. The S&P 500 increased 45% from the first quarter of 2021 through the third quarter of this year, but almost half of that was just inflation driving stock prices higher, not an increase in real value.
The inflation-adjusted increase over that same period is 22%. Still, that’s not a bad rate of return. The problem is that people don’t put all their retirement savings into the stock market, especially as they get closer to retirement. They rely more on fixed income assets, like bonds, which have been decimated recently.
The rapid rise in both inflation and interest rates has been a one-two punch to bond returns, which have had their worst four-year run in at least a century. Ironically, seniors who thought they were being responsible by shifting their retirement savings into bonds as they got older ended up taking the worst losses. […]
— Read More: www.dailysignal.com
