With US stocks tumbling and volatility shooting up, many Americans are keeping a wary eye on their retirement accounts – and even having second thoughts about their future plans.
“It’s troubling times,” says Carl Young, 52, who lives near St Augustine, Florida.
Young, who is originally from Warrington in the UK and has been living in the US for 10 years, is semi-retired after working as an energy industry executive and does part-time consulting work on the side.
The current stock market turmoil, he says, “worries me because it’s self-inflicted, it’s not during Covid. It feels like we’re shooting ourselves in our foot.”
President Donald Trump has argued the impact on global markets from his sweeping tariffs will be short-term, and they are necessary to address trade imbalances and protect American industry.
About 60% of Americans have stock market investments, either directly or through retirement accounts, according to Gallup.
Stock ownership is skewed towards higher earners, older workers and skilled professionals, but that rate is relatively high among developed countries – driven in part by the popularity of 401(k) retirement accounts.
Named after a subclause of tax law, these accounts are an easy tax-free way to save – and often include significant stock market holdings. About 35% of working Americans choose to invest a portion of their pay checks into a 401(k) retirement account.
And although market fluctuations are nothing new, anecdotal evidence indicates that many Americans are concerned that they might be overexposed to recent falls.
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The Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (Tiaa), which provides financial and services and manages $1.4 trillion (£1.1 trillion) in assets for millions of American workers, says calls about its retirement products and online account logins have spiked nearly 30% since last Thursday.
That’s the day after President Trump outlined his tariff plans from the White House Rose Garden. Tiaa says the added call volume is being driven by the flurry of market news.
Since then, financial advisors have largely been urging clients to stay the course and keep a long-term view in mind.
“I remind them if you sell, you may be locking in losses and someone else is buying your investments at a discount,” says Evan Potash, executive wealth management advisor at Tiaa. “I remind my clients that we are prepared for market volatility.”
Some Americans close to retirement are taking that long view. Barry Brown, a 63-year-old living in South Carolina, had once thought about early retirement, but ran some calculations about his health insurance costs and decided to wait until the standard retirement age of 65.
Brown says he enjoys his job as a communications and IT specialist at his local church, and he doesn’t mind working for a couple of more years.
“Of course, I am concerned” about the stock market, he says, but he is leaning on prayer and his Christian faith, and also broadly supports the White House’s economic policy.
“I’m truthfully totally behind President Trump because I feel like the US has taken these tariff hits over the years with no pushbacks,” he says.
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Others are not so enthusiastic about the administration’s policies or sanguine about the future course of the economy.
Catherine Foster lives in central Florida and had hoped to retire when she reached age 60, a little over a year from now.
“I just don’t know if that’s going to happen now,” she says.
Foster, who works as an administrator at a small liberal arts college, says she had a peek at her 401(k) retirement accounts and estimated they are down around $10,000 (£7,827) from their peak – enough to make her think twice about her future plans.
“It’s scary not knowing what’s going to happen down the line,” she says. “If something catastrophic happens to my house, for example, I don’t know what I would do, to find the money to repair it.”
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Foster lives with her older sister, whose retirement accounts took a hit during the Great Recession of 2008 – which along with Covid was another time in recent memory when economic upheaval threatened the future of American retirees.
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Laura Quinby, associate director of employee benefits and labour markets at the Center for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College, says that those two events had very different long-term impacts.
When it came to financial markets, the sharp shock of Covid was relatively short-lived, and was followed by a tight labour market, where jobs were relatively plentiful.
That meant that older Americans found it easier to find work.
“Working longer is one of the most powerful tools that people have to shore up their finances in retirement,” she says.
But after the recession crisis – which started in 2007 and spanned till 2009 and was deeper and wider than the Covid market fluctuations – there were fewer jobs on offer.
“A lot of those older workers who lost their job during the Great Recession weren’t able to find new ones. So a lot of them ended up retiring earlier than they intended, and also saw a drop in their 401(k).”
CRR carried out research 10 years after the financial crisis and found that younger baby boomers, who were in their 40s at the time, took a significant and long-lasting hit to their retirement funds as a result.
And although many economists are predicting that tariffs will lead to recession, financial planners are hoping that the recent turmoil looks more like Covid – a more fleeting storm.
“The market always experiences new things,” says John Daly, a financial planner based in Mount Prospect, Illinois. His firm, Daly Investment Management, oversees $100m in investments.
“This week, clients are calling me and telling me, ‘John, this is different, this is new.’ I agree, but we’re always faced with unique events,” he says.
He said such market volatility is, of course, unpleasant and sparks a sense of unease. But, things should return to normal eventually – it’s just about riding out this moment.
