Interesting morning reading...

As I was checking out Yahoo Finance this morning - I caught an article that sheds some light, perhaps, on why so many Americans are looking to the government for their security.  Some snippets from the article:

The percentage of workers who said they have saved for retirement fell to 69%, from 75% in 2009.

The percentage of American workers with virtually no retirement savings grew for the third straight year, according to a survey released Tuesday. The percentage of workers who said they have less than $10,000 in savings grew to 43% in 2010, from 39% in 2009, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute's annual Retirement Confidence Survey.

..the survey found that 54% of the workers with some form of savings said that they have less than $25,000 stowed away.

Hang with me for a second and let's see what these numbers mean in the big picture.  If 69% have saved something for retirement - 31% have saved nothing (31% have saved $0K).

If 43% of people have less than $10K in savings and 31% have saved nothing..  then 12% (43%-31%) have between $0K and $10K.   

54% of 69% - or 37% - of people that had savings have less than $25,000.  If 12% of savers have less than $10K that means 25% (37%-12%) of all people have between $10K and $25K. 

In summary:

• 31% of people have saved $0K
• 12% of people have saved between $0K and $10K
• 25% of people have saved between $10K and $25K

Now, to be fair, the survey covered employees from age 25 on up.  It would not be expected that the youngest people would have significant retirement savings.  However, in total 67% of American workers have less than $25K in savings for retirement.  It's not surprising that so many people are trying to figure out how to get the government to help them out.

What's truly sad is this last little snippet that indicates most people are not even interested in trying to understand how to be self reliant until, unfortunately, it's too late:

"People just don't want to think about this," said VanDerhei. "Everybody thinks they're too young to think about it, until suddenly they're too old to do anything about it."