How to Money · Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Jean Chatzky explains that the shift from employer-provided pensions to 401(k)s has placed the responsibility for funding retirement primarily on individuals. Her generation and subsequent ones must now manage their own retirement savings, a change that occurred as corporations moved away from pension systems decades ago.
“It's changed completely and it's not really I mean, not every boomer had a pension, but the vast majority of xers do not have the pensions.”
“Xers do not have the pensions because thirty ish forty ish years ago, corporations looked at their balance sheets and said, we can't afford to pay for retirement for all of these workers, or we choose not to pay for retirement for these workers, and so they left the pension system. They adopted the four to oh one K system, and in doing that, shifted responsibility from themselves to workers to fund their own retirements.”
“So my generation and everybody who's grown up after me has had this responsibility for funding our own retirements, much in the same way that healthcare has been put on our shoulders.”