Traditional US pension plans are all but dead except for a small number of people basically grandfathered into systems. Social security doesn't have a way to "b

Traditional US pension plans are all but dead except for a small number of people basically grandfathered into systems. Social security doesn't have a way to "buy up" and invest more to get it to say match ones yearly income. So really every individual investor is on their own until they get to the point where they can sell the risk and buy an annuity (although those tend to be terrible too largely I guess because they want to make $$$$ and other reasons). So, in the US outside of Social security, which isn't a retirement plan, there isn't any option other than to hope you don't have to retire during a downturn, or that you have to go live in a box for a few years to avoid burning all your capital when its value temporary falls for a couple years. Because there isn't any way to recover except to go work at walmart as a door greeter. There have been a number of articles about this over the past decade or two, which boil down to, in the US you can do everything "right" but whether you can actually retire comes down to a bunch of lucky decisions and market timing. So basically its random, with some probably of "success" of landing into a bucket that actually allows you to retire even at 65 which is well into the "everyone is dying off" part of the morality curve. Work till you die is the official plan, but then people might start reconsidering their life choices when there isn't this "you will retire happy" carrot at the end.