Saving for Retirement in a President Trump World

I know this sounds like a politically charged topic, but it's not intended to be. I just want to pose the situation to let readers know a few things. While the Trump platform didn't particularly address retirement issues, how will retirement be affected?

In order to understand this, let's consider a few key non-retirement items that both the Republican-controlled Congress and President-Elect Trump have weighed in on to one extent or another:

• Repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)
• Replace the ACA with a framework that is expected to feature competition across state lines, high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), and a la carte shopping for health plans (you insure what you want to insure to the extent that such coverage is available)
• Simplified (somewhat) Tax Code with lower marginal tax rates for most taxpayers
• Elimination of the Head of Household status for filing taxes

As I've remarked many times, our current retirement system for American workers is not what it was, for example, 30 years ago. It's no longer the norm to have the solid three-legged stool of

• the defined benefit (DB) pension plan from the company you spent most of your career with
• your personal savings in a high-return savings or money market account (you probably even had your choice of a free toaster or alarm clock when you opened the account)
• Social Security

Recall that 401(k) plans were in their infancy and even employees who had them didn't tend to make heavy use of them. 

Under the new [proposed] regime, personal responsibility will be king. Out of your higher after-tax income (not significantly higher for most Americans unless the economy booms to where employers are inclined to offer higher compensation to their employees), you'll need to save for retirement and make HSA deductions to accumulate a rainy-day fund just in case you have a high-cost medical expense. Is that practical?

Under the ACA, $10,000 annual health care deductibles are not all that uncommon. So, you'll want to build up your HSA account to ensure that you're not bankrupted by a large medical expense or even by one that you choose to not purchase coverage for. Let's say you choose to defer the family limit for 2017 -- $6,750. Further, since you've been reading about it online, you need to defer, say, 10% of your family income of $75,000 per year (or $6,250 per month) (well above the national median of about $52,000) or $7,500 to your 401(k). Let's add to that your $2,000 per month house payments (including escrow) and your $750 per month car payments (including insurance) and see where you are before basics like utilities, food, and clothing.

We start with $75,000 and let's pull out 22% of that for federal, state, and FICA taxes bringing you down to $58,500. Let's take out another $4,000 per year for health care through your employer (we'll assume they are subsidizing it) and you're down to $54,500. Now subtract your HSA, 401(k), house payments, and car payments and you're down to $7,750. That's $650 per month to pay for food, clothing, gasoline, and to build up a rainy day account, and you haven't even had a chance to buy anything because you just wanted it.

As they said in the movie, something's gotta give. What's it going to be? My guess is that the first thing you cut back on is your retirement savings. You'll worry about that in some future year. Or, will you? Recent history suggests you won't. 

People who retired 30 years ago tended to be much more prepared for retirement despite their lack of 401(k) plans. They were intended to be merely supplemental to employer-provided pension benefits. Is it possible that the Trump Administration should consider the benefits of incentives to get us back into a DB-biased world? Just asking.