Here is a number that should be on a billboard somewhere.
In 1980, roughly 60 percent of private sector workers with a retirement plan had a traditional pension. Today that figure is in the single digits.
Nobody voted on this. There was no announcement. No employer sat you down and said "we are transferring the entire risk of your old age from our balance sheet to yours, good luck." It just happened, one 401(k) enrollment form at a time, across forty years.
So if you are staring down retirement without a pension, feeling like you missed a memo that everyone else got: you did not miss anything. You are the majority. The memo went out to your parents' generation and was quietly cancelled before it reached yours.
Fine. That is the bad news and it is behind us.
The useful news is that "no pension" is a solvable problem. Not a pleasant one. Not a free one. But solvable, and the solution has a name that nobody finds sexy: you build the pension yourself.
Let's walk through how.