Running Out of Money Now Scares Americans More Than Dying
Two-thirds of Americans say they fear outliving their savings more than death itself, and the margin just hit a record high. For anyone holding gold, silver, or other hard assets as a hedge against exactly this kind of slow-motion financial erosion, the survey data confirms what the metals market has been pricing in for months: confidence in the system’s ability to protect purchasing power is cracking.
A record 67% of Americans now rank running out of money as a greater fear than death, driven by rising healthcare costs, longer lifespans, a looming Social Security shortfall, and the quiet destruction of purchasing power that conventional retirement planning struggles to address.
The findings come from the Allianz Center for the Future of Retirement’s annual survey, reported by USA TODAY, which polled 1,000 adults aged 25 and older with household incomes of at least $50,000 or investable assets of at least $150,000. In five consecutive annual surveys, “running out of money” has beaten death every time. This year, the gap was the widest on record.
The Fear Is Rational
Kelly LaVigne, vice president of consumer insights at Allianz, put the anxiety bluntly:
“It’s running out of money. It’s not being able to afford healthcare. It’s not being able to afford long-term care.”
Those three fears overlap and compound. Life expectancy at birth hit 79 years in 2024, a record, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. People are living longer, which sounds like good news until you realize the financial runway has to stretch further while costs keep climbing. CareScout data shows the average assisted living facility now charges $6,200 a month. That is $74,400 a year, a figure that will consume most retirees’ income streams outright.
Catherine Collinson, CEO of the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, framed the tension clearly:
“In recent decades, we’ve seen tremendous increases in life expectancy and lifespan, but not necessarily in health-span.”
Living longer but not healthier means more years of dependency, more medical bills, and more exposure to a cost structure that has outpaced wage growth and CPI for decades. A separate Transamerica study released in April ranked the top three retirement fears: declining health requiring long-term care (39%), Social Security cuts (38%), and outliving savings and investments (36%).
The Social Security Problem Nobody Has Fixed
Social Security faces a shortfall as soon as 2032. If Congress does nothing, research suggests retirees will see a 28% cut in monthly benefits. That single statistic should concentrate the mind of every investor over 50. The program becomes available to most retirees at age 62, but monthly benefits rise for every year claiming is postponed, up to age 70.
David John, a senior strategic policy adviser at the AARP Public Policy Institute, offered practical counsel:
“The closer you can get to age 70 before you claim, the higher your lifetime benefit will be. The more of your essential expenses you can cover with Social Security, the better off you are.”
That advice is sound as far as it goes. But it assumes the benefit structure survives intact, which is precisely what 38% of Transamerica respondents doubt. Washington has known about the Social Security funding gap for years. The political incentive has always been to delay the fix, because any honest repair involves either raising taxes or trimming benefits, and neither wins votes in a midterm year.
Big Numbers, Real Fear
Part of the anxiety is driven by headline shock. John noted the effect directly:
“You start to see these stories: In order to have a comfortable retirement, you have to have $1.4 million. People see big numbers. And what big numbers may or may not do is actually apply to them. But what it does is scare people.”
He has a point. A $1.4 million target may not apply to a couple in a paid-off house in a low-cost state. But the fear is not irrational when you consider what is actually eroding retirement security: persistent inflation in healthcare, housing, and food; interest rates that spent years below the rate of price increases; and a financial system that quietly transfers purchasing power from savers to borrowers through negative real yields.
Collinson put it plainly: “We can’t overestimate the financial strains that Americans are facing.” Only 29% of Americans engage in retirement planning on a regular basis, and only 31% work with professional financial advisers, according to the Transamerica study. The gap between the scale of the problem and the level of preparation is enormous.
What the Conventional Playbook Offers
The standard advice is to save more and plan better. Recent changes in federal law have raised the ceiling for tax-advantaged contributions. In 2026, any employee with a 401(k) can contribute up to $24,500. Savers aged 50 or older can add catch-up contributions of $8,000, pushing the total to $32,500. Workers aged 60 through 63 have a “super catch-up” limit of $11,250. The 2026 IRA contribution limit is $7,500, with an additional $1,100 catch-up for older savers, for a total of $8,600.
Those are useful tools. But they assume a few things that deserve scrutiny:
- That the purchasing power of dollars saved today will hold up over a 20- to 30-year retirement
- That financial markets will deliver real returns sufficient to outpace healthcare inflation
- That Social Security benefits will not be materially cut
- That long-term care costs will not continue compounding faster than portfolio growth
Each of those assumptions carries risk. And the survey data suggests Americans sense it, even if they cannot articulate the mechanism.
Long-Term Care: The Unhedged Risk
LaVigne called long-term care insurance “the best answer, if you can afford to get it and you can find somebody to write you one.” That qualifier matters. The long-term care insurance market has been shrinking for years as carriers exit or raise premiums. The National Council on Aging reported in 2025 that a typical policy providing a $165,000 benefit for a single 55-year-old might cost $950 a year for a man and $1,500 for a woman. Those premiums sound manageable, but the benefit cap of $165,000 would cover barely two years at the current average assisted-living rate.
The math does not close cleanly. And that is before accounting for the likelihood that care costs will be higher in ten or fifteen years than they are now.
Why This Matters for Metals Investors
This is not just a retirement-planning story. It is a story about trust in the system’s capacity to preserve wealth over time. When two-thirds of a surveyed population with above-median income says running out of money scares them more than dying, that tells you something about the perceived reliability of the dollar-denominated financial architecture.
Gold and silver have historically served as hedges against exactly the risks these respondents are describing: currency debasement, fiscal mismanagement, and the slow erosion of purchasing power that makes a comfortable retirement progressively more expensive in nominal terms. The fear is not about a single market crash. It is about the grinding, compounding effect of a system that incentivizes borrowing and spending over saving and preserving.
Physical gold in a retirement account, or a meaningful allocation to bullion outside the traditional portfolio, does not solve the long-term care problem or fix Social Security. But it addresses a different layer of the same anxiety. It is an asset that cannot be diluted by congressional inaction, cannot be inflated away by central bank policy, and does not depend on a counterparty’s promise to pay.
Collinson noted that “access to a financial adviser can be helpful, because they work with hundreds or thousands of clients, so they have experience with what the potential risks and the potential outcomes can be.” That is reasonable advice. But the advisers who matter most right now are the ones willing to talk honestly about what happens when the conventional playbook meets a fiscal trajectory that nobody in Washington seems willing to correct.
The Deeper Signal
Record-high fear of outliving savings is a sentiment indicator, not a market signal. But sentiment shapes behavior. People who fear running out of money hoard cash, delay spending, seek hard assets, and lose faith in institutions that promise future benefits. That behavioral shift has consequences for consumption, for asset allocation, and for the political tolerance of fiscal and monetary experimentation.
The Allianz survey captures something the bond market and the gold market have been reflecting in their own languages. When the public fears the future more than death, the demand for assets that hold value across decades does not need a sales pitch. It needs only arithmetic.
The system does not have to collapse for these fears to be justified. It just has to keep doing what it has been doing: running deficits, deferring reform, and letting inflation quietly transfer wealth from savers to the state. That is the retirement risk no 401(k) contribution limit can fully offset.
