We scrimp. We save. We plan. And we dream that when we retire-at 50 or 70 or 90-we’ll ride off into the sunset on a chariot made of our sequestered gold.

But you can stop the dream right there.

It turns out that for all our good intentions, American retirement is in free fall. The problem isn’t just the well-documented coming crisis in Social Security. Rather, by any measure, all the promises we made ourselves about the golden years of leisure are turning out to be empty.

By one broad measure of financial health, households in or near retirement appear to have a pretty comfortable nest egg: the present value of their Social Security benefits is about $160,000. There’s also an average $136,000 worth of defined pension benefits, $94,000 in retirement accounts, $104,000 in housing equity, and more than $300,000 in other assets. Unfortunately, those are just averages: if you put me and Warren Buffett in a room together, our average wealth is in the billions, but I still can’t buy a yacht.

When we look at the median numbers-the folks smack dab in the middle of the wealth distribution-the situation looks pretty grim. Social Security is still there. But 50 percent of Americans […]