Call them Gen AnXious. Gen Xers are increasingly worried about how they'll pay for retirement, after having endured the dot-com bust, the global financial crisis and housing collapse, and stagnant wage growth during their formative adult years.
That's according to the "Wisdom of Experience: Lessons Learned from Millennial, Generation X and Baby Boomer Investors" survey from American Funds, which found that 63 percent of Gen Xers are kept awake at night worrying about their retirement.
In addition, 28 percent are worried they're not earning enough money to be able to invest for the future—and that's not surprising, considering that 25 percent are worried about paying down debt and financing their children's education.
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It's both sad and ironic that Gen Xers should be so troubled, since 42 percent of them started saving for retirement before age 25. Only 28 percent of boomers did so—although millennials seem to have learned from Gen Xers' financial woes; 59 percent of millennials began retirement saving before hitting that quarter-century mark.
But they're also more optimistic about future market returns than boomers, who may doubt the market's potential but are optimistic about their own retirement. Gen Xers—and millennials—on the other hand place more faith in the market than they do in their own retirement. Considering the financial crises that stripped Gen Xers' net worth, that's another bit of irony.
Still, over the next 10 years, only 16 percent of boomers expect the market to do as well as the last five years of relatively strong returns, while nearly twice as many Gen Xers (28 percent) and millennials (31 percent) picked the most bullish scenario. In addition, half of all boomers (48 percent) expect market returns to be lower than historical averages over the next two to three decades, compared to 29 percent of Gen Xers and millennials.
Within each group, men and women differed in their levels of optimism; while men were a lot more optimistic than women about the investment outlook in the next 10 years, women had a more positive outlook than men regarding the next two or three decades.
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