This is Motley Cool Answers. I'm Alice in Southwick, joined as always by Roberto, Bro Campo,

personal finance experto, here at the Motley Fool. Oh, hi, bro.

Greetings to one and all. In this week's episode, we're going to learn how to thrive at work

amidst the

great resignation. Roe explains how the work-to-retirement ratio determines how much you need to save,

and we'll answer a list of question about building up cash amidst a frothy market. All that, and

actually, that feels like plenty. On this week's episode of Motley Full Answers.

You may have heard that many Americans

haven't saved enough for retirement. Well, here's some recent evidence. Northwestern Mutual

surveyed more than 2,000 Americans for the firm's 2021 planning and progress study. And here are the

average amounts of retirement savings according to generation. So the millennials, $63,000,

Gen X, about $99,000, and the boomers,

you know, the people who are close to who are in retirement, $139,000. Now, many factors explain this lack of savings, but one is our declining work-to-retirement ratio. It's a concept described in a few

articles by Alex Pollock, who is a resident fellow at the

R Street Institute, who has also worked at the Treasury Department, the American Enterprise Institute,

and the Federal Reserve. As Pollock explained in a handful of articles dating back as far as 2005,

the work-to-retirement ratio is essentially how many years someone works for each year of retirement.

And to understand how much it's changed, you have to know a few things about the history of retirement.

So let's start in 1889 when Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of Imperial Germany, created the very first government pension program.

And their retirement age was set at 70. Here in America, one of the

earliest corporate pension systems was created by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1900. And the

retirement age was also 70, as was the case with many early state pensions. Now, back then,

...