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And now to Wall Street. Since President Trump took office, the S&P 500 has plummeted by more than 7%. That is the worst performance in a president's first hundred days since the early 1970s. For many Americans, that has meant anxiety about their retirement accounts, and as NPR's Laurel Wamsley reports, some people are reassessing when they will be able to stop working.
LAUREL WAMSLEY, BYLINE: For Lora Anderson, the last few weeks have brought uneasiness.
LORA ANDERSON: It's like anything can happen, which makes it difficult to plan.
WAMSLEY: She's 61 and teaches at a university in Cincinnati and had been planning to retire in five or six years. But with the markets lately, that milestone could be further off.
ANDERSON: I think now it's going to be longer than that by a few years. Everything's being impacted right now with the tariff situation and other economic issues.
WAMSLEY: When she looked at her 401(k) recently, she was rattled, though, after talking with her financial adviser, she felt a bit better.
ANDERSON: It felt like a significant loss to me, but my - as I talked to my financial adviser the other day, he said I was, like, 1.5% down. They've done very good for me in terms of trying to keep things so that when the market swings very bad, my stuff doesn't swing quite as badly.
WAMSLEY: But she's still feeling some worry. And with the stock market fluctuation and the cost of things going up...
ANDERSON: I just feel like there's so much uncertainty right now that I still don't feel like my original retirement plan is going to be doable.
WAMSLEY: That uncertainty is shared by many who are reaching retirement age. More than 4 million Americans turn 65 this year - and the next and the next. And market whiplash can give even the most cautious investor cause for concern. Amy Rowland is one of them. She's 63 and runs a small nonprofit in Salt Lake City. She was feeling confident she was on the right track for retirement until she recently checked her account.
AMY ROWLAND: And then it just - it's a fairly big reduction to the dollars. And it's just scary seeing the reduction amount be, you know, more than what I make in a year, more than what I make in, I think, two years is what it looked like.
WAMSLEY: She's still making her typical contributions, especially since there's an employer match. But all the turmoil has given her reason to reconsider.
ROWLAND: As things don't get better, you feel like, am I throwing money in just to see it shrink, (laughter), you know? - just that seems like a bad idea, too.
WAMSLEY: Of course, the markets may rebound, but the volatility can shake people's confidence. For Rowland and her husband, the timing of this tariff drama isn't great. At the end of December, they bought a small fixer-upper to renovate, with the plan to sell their current home and downsize to the smaller house. They were excited and planned to use some of their money to outfit the new house with a new refrigerator and a second bathroom.
ROWLAND: Should I be spending that money now, and how much more is all this going to cost now? And suddenly, that whole plan definitely feels like, at this moment, this is maybe the dumbest moment to do it.
WAMSLEY: She knows other folks have it a lot worse, but she was trying to do what felt like the right thing - to start clearing the path for younger folks.
ROWLAND: Part of the other reason for retiring is this feeling that it is time for the younger generation to get the jobs, you know? And so part of me retiring is kind of that feeling that, yeah, it is probably time for my generation to step aside. But we can't do it if we don't think we can survive (laughter) our retirement years.
WAMSLEY: It's that feeling that may cause those who can to keep working. In a moment when the future is hard to predict, many are holding on to what they've got.
Laurel Wamsley, NPR News.
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