And you think you have it bad. It's getting tougher and tougher to reach retirement age, because that age keeps getting pushed back by financial restrictions.

According to NerdWallet, the class of 2015 won't hit retirement age till they're 75, thanks to financial pressures that will keep them at the daily grind a full two years past the projected retirement age of 73 that the class of 2013 can expect.

And that's 13 years longer than the current average retirement age of 62. What a bleak prospect.

Recommended For You

So what's keeping this fresh-faced crop of grads from anticipating retirement at a younger age?

Three major factors: crushing student loan debt, rents on the rise, and how millennials manage their money.

NerdWallet assumed an average starting salary for a 23-year-old 2015 grad to be $45,478; that's actually what the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported the median starting salary for grads to be last year—this year's figures aren't yet out.

Running the numbers from there, they found that they're not pretty.

The average balance grads are carrying in student loans is $35,051.

If they make average annual loan payments of $4,239, it will take them 10 years to pay that off—and that will end up costing them $684,474 in lost retirement savings over a 50-year period.

That's nearly two and a half times the average amount saved by residents in the best-prepared state in the country: $286,277. And it's way more than the $95,000 average retirement savings in a Natixis poll.

Then there's the matter of rent. Everybody's gotta live somewhere, and graduates who aren't still nesting with their parents will be forking over plenty to have a place of their own. Zillow figures indicate that since 2012, rents across the country are up an average of 11 percent. Salaries certainly aren't rising that quickly.

And if they're paying rent, they're not amassing equity in a home—so that's money that's lost and gone forever and can't be recouped, even in part, when they move on to a new dwelling.

Last, but far from least, is how they save. Millennials took the lessons of the Great Recession to heart, and are holding a large chunk of their savings in cash: checking and savings accounts and term deposits like CDs —an average of 40 percent, in fact, according to State Street research.

Since those accounts pay next to nothing in interest, that means that millennials aren't earning anything significant on the money they have set aside.

While NerdWallet only set the annual rate of return for investments, rather than savings, at a relatively conservative 6 percent, it found that having that much money set aside in savings rather than in investments could cost millennials "more than $300,000 (22 percent of the retirement savings they could have built with a better investment mix)."

NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.