For most retirees, inflation doesn't hit nearly as hard. No transportation to work every day, no kids to feed or clothe, home often paid off, generally lower expenses all around. Earning 5-7% off of a savings account, or maybe municipal bonds, was once a huge, reliable supplement to Social Security.

As far as the second part of your comment, you should get your head out of the clouds and look around at working-class America. Perhaps 20% of retirees own a significant amount of stock, or own a house worth enough to cash out of. The US median home price didn't even cross $250k until 2018. https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/

> As far as the second part of your comment, you should get your head out of the clouds and look around at working-class America. Perhaps 20% of retirees own a significant amount of stock, or own a house worth enough to cash out of. The US median home price didn't even cross $250k until 2018. https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/

Those "retirees" also do not have enough money to retire. To retire and live off the interest of a theoretical 5% interest savings account for 30 years requires you to already be wealthy. If you're a working-class baby boomer, you may have gotten that from your house when you sold it and moved into a bad neighborhood or an apartment. But that's just about the only way other than Social Security and old pensions that you're going to keep eating.

Savings accounts used to pay anywhere from 5 to 8 percent back when inflation was 1 to 2 percent. You didn't expect to live off the interest, but you did expect the drain rate to be far less than with effectively zero interest.

>Savings accounts used to pay anywhere from 5 to 8 percent back when inflation was 1 to 2 percent.

source? using the data from FRED https://i.imgur.com/O6EdHco.png, the periods where that was true (ie. interest rates being 4-6 percentage points above inflation is few and far between.

In India it used to be common for elderly to live of interests from fixed deposits, or other instruments of this kind.

From a few years Mutual funds have been quite famous, but inflation is so high, nothing really works.

Here in India only safe source of income is rent income.

They haven’t paid that much for well over a decade. If you’ve failed to take a hint by now and are still keeping all your savings in a bank account, you have no one to blame but yourself.