A fresh report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute is signaling that most Americans are going to be retiring with nowhere close to having enough assets and savings for retirement. The long and short of the matter is that chances are high that much of America is probably going to retire in poverty. There are a myriad of reasons for this looming crisis, but the end result is a shocker regardless of the cause.

24/7 Wall St. wants you to pay close attention here. This should be a wakeup call to anyone with a 401K, ESOP, IRA, pension fund, or other form of retirement fund. It will sound like an exaggeration that much of the American public is basically facing bankruptcy at retirement. Let the figures speak for themselves.

The 2013 Retirement Confidence Survey is actually not much worse than the prior report, but it is truly a low point for the future of America. The EBRI is signaling that the percentage of workers confident about having enough money for a comfortable retirement is essentially unchanged from the record lows observed in 2011. Having a statistical precision of plus or minus 3 percentage points should not sway any opinion that this is a future retirement crisis.

While more than half expressed some level of confidence (13% are very confident and 38% are somewhat confident), some 28% are not at all confident (up from 23% in 2012 but statistically equivalent to 27% in 2011), and 21% are not too confident.

Translation: Only 13% of those who are going to retire are very confident about their retirement, while 28% are admitting that they are not confident at all that they will have enough assets at retirement.

If you are looking for any good news, at least there are 51% who are somewhat confident or very confident. The results were unchanged for a financially secure retirement with only 18% saying they are very confident and some 14% who said that they are not at all confident.

Another sad figure is that only 46% of those surveyed confirmed that they and/or their spouse have tried to calculate how much money they will need to have saved by the time they retire so that they can live comfortably in retirement. Also, only 2% of workers and only 4% of retirees identified “saving or planning for retirement” as the most pressing financial issue facing most Americans today.

As far as the cause, the primary reason cited (41% of responses) for not contributing (or not contributing more) to their employer’s plan was the cost of living and day-to-day expenses eating up funds. Too much debt was another citation as 55% of workers and 39% of retirees reported having a problem with their level of debt.

Beware the next recession whenever it arrives. Only half of those surveyed, broken out as 50% of workers and 52% of retirees, said that they could definitely come up with $2,000 if an unexpected need arose within the next month. The thought that only half of working or retired Americans can come up with $2,000 within the next month is not just scary. This is alarming.

The Retirement Confidence Survey was conducted in January 2013 by 20-minute telephone interviews with 1,254 individuals (1,003 workers and 251 retirees) who were aged 25 and older using random digit dialing along with a cell phone supplement to obtain a representative cross section of the U.S. population.

We read through much of the data in the full PDF report and it is really nothing short of alarming. Forget about the fact that the media uses the word “crisis” way too often. With this having been conducted in January, the effect of the payroll tax holiday expiring was by and large not yet felt by Joe Public. We have also since then seen that nearly two-thirds of those who are soon to be at retirement age are likely to postpone retirement. Keep in mind that the bulk of the investing public just missed out on four or five years worth of retirement savings.

Last October we showed which states had the most residents whose were the most and least prepared for retirement.

FULL EBRI REPORT

24/7 Wall St. has a message for its readers, and we cannot say this loud enough. If you do not have any form of retirement account set up at all, you better get off your duff and get started saving for your retirement right now! Government handouts for free food and unemployment are not going to last forever, and the US National Debt Clock has just gone above $16.7 trillion as of March 19, 2013. We do not really want to hear about any of you being forced to eat pet food in what should be your golden years.

Please take note of this warning as it is no joke. We really mean it.

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