Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited.

What is the median retirement savings in the United States today?
Social security and pensions make up a big part of it.  You may want to look at the source of the data.  If a person, has 5K at Vanguard, 5K at Fidelity and 100K at the bank; Fidelity will report on that person as having only 5K.  Vanguard will do the same. The opening pitch of a life insurance salesman sometimes includes the "100 man story".  Before retirement age:  26% of people will die, 54% will be broke, 5% will work, 4% will be secure, and 1% will be wealthy.  Then they sell you life insurance which is a horrible product for retirement savings. If you further dig into this subject you will find a great disparity between the mean and median retirement savings.  That is because many Americans have none, and those that do skew the average upward and have no where near mean or average. Its like this with other things in personal finance.  For example those with actual credit card debt have much higher than the average.  As those with none, or even no credit cards skew the average downward.  In my opinion it is like this because of behavior.  If one saved half of the average car payment over their working life in a growth stock mutual fund, they would make it to that 4% category.  If they also had a good salary, kept debt to a minimum, and saved a healthy amount they would make it to that 1% category.  It was a daily choice that was made many years prior to retirement.