Business Insider | America's new age of retirement anxiety

The pessimism is understandable: People estimate they need about $1.5 million to live as they want to in retirement, but only a small fraction of savers actually have that amount stashed away. Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist at The New School and the author of "Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy," told me that given these expectations, the anxiety is well founded.

"There's nothing irrational about being nervous that you won't have enough money to live on to last your whole life, because most people do not have enough money to last their whole life and maintain their standard of living in retirement," she said.

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