An Introduction To The Next Egg

Greetings, Next Egg community! Nairuti here, the Next Egg’s new community manager, with some big news. The Next Egg has officially become a project of LIFT Economy! What does that mean for you? That means that you can expect more content, more events, and better support via this platform, as well as more public-facing curated content that you can share with your friends and loved ones about the ins and outs of what we’ve learned along this four-year journey of reimagining retirement.

I wanted to share a little bit about my story, so you can get a sense of who is going to be accompanying you in this shared investigation to reimagine retirement in the United States today…..

My journey to the Next Egg—perhaps not unlike many of you!—has been a winding one. Six years prior to my foray into the working world, my mother secured an H1-B visa sponsorship from an IT firm in the Dulles high-tech corridor right outside of Washington DC. My father and I followed a few months later in June. In September, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers and my parents watched, horrified, as the American Dream disintegrated behind Lady Liberty. It was at that moment that I began to see the extent to which my personal experience (and that of my BIPOC migrant brethren) was being molded by larger forces of empire, labor, and capital.

Across the past decade, this positionality as a Queer, Desi 1.5-gen immigrant woman of color has deeply informed my work and study at the nexus of racial and economic justice in the US and abroad. Most recently, I served as the Director of Research for Beloved Economies, a national narrative change campaign demonstrating the power of transforming work—both as a social institution and practice—as an oft-underutilized lever for greater economic and social change. What I gleaned from this experience was this: regenerative finance was the engine that powered social movements. More importantly, I wanted to be someone who didn't simply oil the machine, but worked to hospice the parts that were no longer serving movement leaders and design and build new ones that were.  

Cue LIFT Economy’s Next Economy MBA program (shoutout to Cohort IX!), where I met my now colleague and collaborator, Erin Axelrod, who shared with me that there is $35 trillion locked up in retirement savings in the US today and this community was working to get that money out of Wall Street and into the hands of everyday people like you and me. 

The notion of retirement and saving is a contentious one for me—conjuring up a class consciousness littered with guilt, shame, and anger. (I’ll talk more about the intersection of a class analysis and retirement savings in a later post.) Today, my savings look like this: 

• $4,499.76 in an emergency savings account with PNC Bank; 

• $7,117.63 in a SEP IRA managed by Fidelity; 

• $14,365.36 in a Roth IRA managed by Fidelity; and 

• $34,568.04 in an individual account managed by Fidelity. 

The individual account is one I plan on using to fund a part of my sabbatical, support my parents in putting my younger sisters through college (both rising sophomores at public institutions out of state), and, if there is money left over, support myself through graduate school. My partner (who is currently in a PhD program at the University of Notre Dame) and I have thought about marriage and purchasing a home, but both, right now, seem like a far away pipe dream. 

I expect to earn approximately $60,000 this year, 15% of which will be taken away to pay self-employment taxes, 22% to pay federal income taxes, and 3.23% to cover Indiana state income taxes. My monthly household expenses are approximately $3,000, leaving me with around $6,000 of savings at the end of the year, all of which I expect to use to help pay for my sisters’ tuition. 

To be very blunt, I honestly do not know what kinds of industries and projects I’m investing in with these funds governed by Fidelity. Though some are in an “environmentally sustainable fund”, I’m well aware that those investments include contributions to companies like Microsoft and Tesla. 

When a local friend and I initially embarked on a journey to learn more about community investing (shoutout to Michael Shuman—we did so by first reading your book, Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity), I was hopeful. I thought: Great! I’ve got this money and  I know of several successful (either cooperatively owned or beloved local institutions) businesses I’d like to invest in, so all I have to do is withdraw my funds and just walk over and hand a check to some business owners, sign some papers guaranteeing a reasonable return, and voilà! 

Since then, of course, I’ve learned a lot more—from the classist distinction between accredited and unaccredited investors, the batshit prudent investor rule, to the panic-inducing conundrum of rollovers—and am left buzzing with the following questions about aging, savings, and retirement in America: 

• How can we embrace a more collectivist, community-of-care approach to aging in the United States? 

• What might it look like to negotiate my/our needs (e.g. food, water, housing, clothing, transportation) outside a monetary context? 

I will becoming much more active when I return from my summer sabbatical September 1st and I look forward to getting to know each of you come September and answer these questions (and many more!) in community. In the meantime… 

What questions are alive for you when you consider the landscape of retirement in our country today? How can The Next Egg support you in this journey? What kinds of content/community gatherings/expert advice might you be interested in engaging with this fall? 

Until soon, dear Next Egg community. ❤️

The Next Egg: Shameless Data

As many of us know, the Next Egg is founded on the assumption that people have retirement savings to move out of Wall Street. Unfortunately, for many of us in the United States today, that is simply not true, particularly along the lines of class and race. Several of you on this very platform have shared your lack of retirement savings—and the reasoning ranges from unlivable wages, a lack of generational wealth on which to fall back, unstable or unreliable employment, needing to pay for health crises or the ever-increasing costs of higher education, to structural racism. 

Consider the following questions: 

• How are the ways in which individuals can begin saving for retirement in the first place? 

• What are the mechanisms by which one saves for retirement? Who has had access to them? For how long? Who hasn’t (and, more importantly, why not and for how long)? 

• Who has the ability to save? And, more importantly, who doesn’t? 

• What information related to personal finance, budgeting, and retirement savings is available? To whom? To whom is it not? 

• For those who are able to save and self-direct their investments, where does power lie? 

The data paint a bleak picture. 

• Only about 50% of households in the United States report any savings in retirement accounts (Hoffman et al., 2022).

• ¼ of Americans have no retirement savings at all (Hoffman et al., 2022).

• About 54% white people own a (or multiple) retirement account(s), while only about 37% of Black folks own at least one retirement account (Hoffman et al., 2022).

• Retirement account ownership rates are lowest among Latinx communities at a measly 28.3% (Hoffman et al., 2022).

• Thirty-four percent of Hispanic families and 45% of Black families have individual or employee-sponsored retirement accounts, compared to 60% of white families (Hoffman et al., 2022).

• Forty-eight percent of workers believe they don’t make enough money to adequately save for retirement (Borwick, 2023). 

• More than nine million workers over the age of 65 are still in the labor force,  either actively working or seeking work (Martin, 2014). 

• Fifty percent of individuals between ages 55 and 62 don’t have the resources to pay for basic retirement needs or uninsured medical expenses (Yoshikane, 2011). 

• Some states don’t make public information about which financial firms are managing that state’s residents’ pensions (Sirota, 2014).

• In 2022, renters’ reported that their average likelihood of owning a home was less than 50%, historically a way to build long-term wealth and supplement retirement income (Roepe, 2023).

• Social Security payments, which are dwindling fast, comprise 90% or more of an individual’s retirement income today (Dagher, 2023). 

• Women—even those with a college degree—report feeling less comfortable in managing self-directed retirement savings (The Fed, 2022).  

• Only 53% of women have started saving for retirement, compared with 65% of men. Much of that disparity is a direct result of the gender pay gap (Krawcheck, 2016). 

• While over 75% of married people are adequately prepared for retirement, only 55% of singles are (RAND, 2014). 

• People with disabilities have fewer retirement savings than those without (The Fed, 2022). 

In beginning to answer these questions, I am: (1) letting go of any of the shame, guilt, or disappointment in not meeting societal expectations of how much I should have saved for retirement at my age; and (2)  recognizing the deep need for a class and race conscious analysis of our community building work on this platform. 

So, where does this leave us? How can the Next Egg better support those with little to no retirement savings on this platform (beyond encouraging them to simply save more/better)? 

Collectivizing Retirement: Meeting Our Needs Without Savings

In an earlier blog post, I asked: what might it look like to negotiate our needs (e.g. food, water, housing, clothing, transportation) outside a monetary context? Though in writing this post, I wasn’t able to arrive at a conclusion that precludes money, I did attempt to address this question, leveraging some of  our members’ (that’s you!) old posts and exercising imagination abundance when considering the notion of personal security in the age of retirement. 

Cooperativizing Real Estate 

When imagining my dream retirement scenario, I see myself living in an ecovillage with my partner, my younger sisters, and a dozen of our closest friends and comrades sharing the responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, and other household chores. Indeed, communal living in retirement isn’t so far from our reality today. Many of you have shared similar visions, but feel overwhelmed by the implementation. What does it look like to co-found and invest in a community land trust? What might it look like to build housing and grow food together on shared land? Put simply, is there a way to make groups like EBPREC the norm? 

Crowdfunding 

When GoFundMe came on the scene in 2010, it was a way to capitalize on the generosity of everyday people to address individual needs in the absence of structural solutions. Today, crowdfunding is a multibillion dollar industry, but not without its critics. Much of the industry relies on designing and relaying a compelling narrative, often perpetuating stereotypes of the poor peoples and denying them voice and nuance by flattening their experiences into poverty porn. But, are there ways to see crowdfunding as a form of reparations? Could we systematically encourage the white and wealthy to make contributions to the retirement savings of their poor BIPOC brethren? Are there ways in which to leverage crowdfunding principles to encourage place-based, equity-oriented, and targeted investments into certain communities? What about community wealth funds, where governance is distributed across the beneficiaries? 

Participatory Budgeting 

While the previous two imaginings still require monetary capital as an enabling condition for their success, participatory budgeting (PB), to me, feels much more proactive. Originating in Brazil, PB is “a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives people real power over real money”. Though South Bend, the city where I currently reside, engages residents in the budgeting process, they often do so with a pre-set list of priorities and, ultimately, residents do not have a role in implementation nor is the city accountable to their feedback. The reason PB feels so compelling to me when considering personal security in retirement, I can imagine feeling much less compelled to save if I knew that my local and state government were going to meet my needs as I approach and through my elderhood. 

Sharing is Caring: Commoning to Meet our Needs

While many of us have experienced the power of sharing via public libraries, few likely have experiences sharing anything else…which is weird, considering much of what we use doesn’t necessarily require private ownership. When I lived in Baltimore, I worked closely with the Baltimore Community ToolBank and became obsessed with visions of a sharing economy. Consider transportation: how can we meet our needs to get from one place to another in elderhood without needing to have our own car? What if instead of money, we used time-based currency, exchanging hours of our unique skills, talents, and expertise to meet our needs, instead of dollars? Another term to help us better understand this transition to the sharing economy is “commoning”, a term frequently used by David Bollier in his writings. 

What does your employer owe you? 

Finally, as the recent Director of Research for Beloved Economies, a national narrative change campaign demonstrating the power of transforming work—both as a social institution and practice—as an oft-underutilized lever for greater economic and social change, I often think about what our employers owe us. Particularly in a context where we continue to negotiate our needs in a system of a wage-labor, I almost feel as though it is our employers’ responsibility to support us in achieving personal security. But, beyond a 401(k) match, what else can employers do? The Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), one of the co-founders of this project and platform, provides its employees with a salary above (1.3 times, to be exact) the liveable wage that affords employees the opportunity to save. Other worker cooperatives are figuring out ways to expense worker owner livelihood costs, as business expenses can be tax deductible, much like a traditional retirement plan. Could our employers support us more intentionally to meet our housing needs? What about food and transportation? And our healthcare and caretaking responsibilities, which undoubtedly increase with age?

What about you? How might you creatively meet your basic human needs in your elder age?