“I thought, well, I’m already getting it, and that was it,” Davis says. “How will I get retirement from any other job?”
Not having an option to save more “didn’t really bother me,” she adds. “I needed to go and work just to keep me going.”
401(k) confusion
Davis’ particular misconception about retirement plans may be unusual, says Jason Washo, a certified financial planner and president of Washo Financial in Scottsdale, Arizona, but confusion over such benefits is not.
A 2023 survey by financial services company Principal of working adults who were not participating in an available workplace retirement plan found that more than 1 in 5 didn’t know they were eligible for the plan, and nearly 3 in 5 mistakenly believed that they had been enrolled and were contributing.
Davis’ former coworkers at the assisted living center will soon have access to a retirement savings plan. New York State is in the final stages of implementing an “auto IRA” program that will require most employers that don’t offer a savings plan of their own to enroll employees in a state-facilitated individual retirement account.
The program, called Secure Choice, is slated to launch in late 2025 — too late for Davis, who retired for good in March. She loved the job at the assisted living facility and still visits three or four times a month to see residents she had grown close to.
It’s part of what she describes as a fulfilling retirement. She rents a small apartment down the street from Philip and stops in regularly after church on Sundays for meals with her daughter and grandchildren.
“They will cook and feed me,” Davis says. “Jamaican rice and chicken, or steak and broccoli, sweet potatoes and stuff.”
After working for decades in long-term care, Davis enjoys her retirement in Brooklyn, but she wishes she could afford a house “with my own garden for golden girls in the city.”
Juan C. Giraldo
Food also figures prominently when she visits her son, John Philip, in Pennsylvania. She’s teaching him her old recipes. “He was like, ‘Mom, how do you make the dumpling? How do you make this? What do you put in it?’ ” she says. “Now he can cook really good, too.”
Davis regularly travels back to Antigua, where another daughter and three grandchildren live. Her one regret is that she can’t afford to buy a house of her own, “with my own garden for golden girls in the city.”
Her mom having a home where the kids and grandkids could gather “would have been great,” Philip says. “It would be nice for the family, especially around holidays.”