Chicago, Ill — The recent turbulence in the U.S. stock markets is spooking some older workers and retirees, a group that was hit particularly hard during the most recent financial crisis.
There’s no indication, though, that the recent volatility has brought about large-scale overhauls in retirement planning.
“There’s a lot of fear that if you have another event like 2008 and you retire the year before or the year after, you’re screwed. I’m not taking that risk,” says Mark Patterson, a recently retired patent attorney from Nashville, Tennessee.
By the time the market bottomed out during the financial crisis in 2009, an estimated $2.7 trillion had been wiped out of Americans’ retirement accounts, according to the Urban Institute.
“There’s a huge fear of folks my age that they’re going to run out of money and they’re going to need to rely on the government for help.”
Older Americans, in particular, have had a tough time recovering their losses.
The Pew Research Center estimates the net worth of the median Baby Boomer household in 2016 was still nearly 18 percent shy of where it sat in 2007.