No one except the super rich just have a pool of savings that they are going to retire on; for normal people the amount you need to be putting away right now de

No one except the super rich just have a pool of savings that they are going to retire on; for normal people the amount you need to be putting away right now depends on the amount you are going to put away in the future. Let's say you are in your 50s, have a nice upper middle class job that you spent a few decades becoming qualified for. You are putting away a reasonable fraction of your income such that you can live comfortably now and retire in 10 years. Then the economy collapses, you lose this high paying job and there are no comparable positions available. You are unemployed for a few months and then under-employed working retail at target. You still have all the expenses of an upper middle class lifestyle, but with a salary maybe a bit above minimum wage. You can tighten your belt a bit but a lot of those expenses like your mortgage still need to be paid. Selling off investment assets despite the poor market and reducing the amount of money you put away for retirement is likely your only reasonable option to maintain your current standard of living. The stock market rebounded quickly, but people were still underemployed and had burned through a lot of their savings to stay afloat, so they didn't have the funds to buy back into the market, certainly not to the level they were prior to the crisis. Retirement is inherently a measure of savings, anything that makes you eat into savings will push back the earliest date you could have retired. Saying they simply didn't have enough money is like a doctor saying you just aren't immune enough to symptoms: maybe not incorrect but a thoroughly useless diagnosis.