> "People aren't saving enough for retirement" has been the case forever. It's human nature to prioritize urgency over importance, and when it's most impactful to save for retirement (your early 20s) you're making the least and it's really hard to justify maxing out that 401(k) and Roth IRA as a new grad in an expensive city, or in a non-HCOL area making comparatively less. Not a lot of 20-somethings want to drop a third of their gross into a retirement fund especially if they have high earnings potential as most people reading these comments do.

It's a huge stretch to pin that on the proliferation of credit.

Most people reading these comments aren't the average person. We live in a privileged bubble where we have the income that generates the possibility of being able to own property.

There are far more people living paycheck-to-paycheck with the "assistance" of a credit card than we would like to admit.[0] If there weren't, the Fed wouldn't have injected so much money into the economy during the pandemic. They did so because the average person doesn't have the savings to not work for a month, and because the US federal government doesn't have the savings to give out the money as funded by tax revenues.

[0]https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/living-paychec...