Roughly 26% of Americans between the ages of 40 and 55 have less than $50,000 saved for retirement, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. That statistic felt abstract to me until I met Samantha Fitzgerald.
A veterans’ support group in Des Moines made the introduction. Samantha had shared pieces of her story at one of their meetings — not because she was a veteran herself, but because her husband Marcus, a former Army logistics specialist, had connected with the group after his discharge. A coordinator passed along her contact, describing her simply as someone who “had a lot going on financially and wasn’t afraid to talk about it.” That turned out to be an understatement.
When I sat down with Samantha Fitzgerald at a diner near her home on a Tuesday morning in late February 2026, she arrived with a manila folder stuffed with printed bank statements and a yellow legal pad covered in her own calculations. She is 43, works as a warehouse supervisor earning approximately $52,000 a year, and has a daughter, Maya, now 11, who was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age three. She was precise, almost clinical, about her numbers — and visibly exhausted by what they meant.
The Cosign That Changed Everything
The trouble started, Samantha told me, in the spring of 2022. Her brother-in-law, Derek, needed a personal loan to cover equipment for a small landscaping business he was launching. He couldn’t qualify alone, and he asked Samantha to cosign a $22,500 loan through a regional lender. She agreed.
“I ran the numbers,” she said, smoothing a crease in her legal pad. “He had contracts lined up. I looked at his projections. I genuinely thought it was a good risk.” Derek made payments for fourteen months. Then, in August 2023, he stopped. By January 2024, the lender had classified the loan as in default and come after Samantha as the cosigner of record.
She ultimately paid $14,800 out of pocket — drawn from a combination of savings and a hardship withdrawal from her 401(k) — to settle the remaining balance and avoid a civil judgment. The hardship withdrawal triggered a 10% early withdrawal penalty plus income taxes, which she estimates cost her an additional $3,100 in the 2023 tax year. All told, the default drained roughly $17,900 from her financial position in under eight months.
Her credit score dropped from 718 to 641 during the default period, she said, which had its own downstream consequences. A refinance she had been planning to lower her mortgage rate was no longer viable at terms that made sense.
A Mortgage That Stopped Making Sense
Samantha and Marcus bought their three-bedroom home in a Des Moines suburb in October 2019 for $247,000. At the time, the purchase seemed sound — a 30-year fixed mortgage at 3.75%, with a monthly payment of approximately $1,430 including taxes and insurance. Then the market shifted. Then the default happened.
By early 2025, she told me, a neighbor’s comparable home sold for $224,000. A second sold for $219,500. Samantha currently owes approximately $228,000 on her mortgage. She is, by her own calculation on that yellow legal pad, underwater by somewhere between $4,000 and $10,000 depending on the month.
She has not missed a mortgage payment. That discipline, she made clear, comes at a cost — it leaves almost no room for anything else. Monthly household expenses, she walked me through line by line, run approximately $4,600 after taxes on their combined income of roughly $67,000 (Marcus works part-time in a distribution role). That leaves under $500 a month in theoretical discretionary income. In practice, Samantha said, it’s usually closer to zero.
The Cost of Caring for Maya
Maya’s needs are the fixed variable Samantha cannot negotiate around. The 11-year-old requires applied behavior analysis therapy three days a week, occupational therapy twice monthly, and a specialized educational aide during the school day. Their health insurance through Samantha’s employer covers a portion of the ABA therapy — but not all of it.
Samantha estimates their out-of-pocket health costs for Maya average $1,340 per month after insurance. Annual out-of-pocket spending on Maya’s care has exceeded $15,000 in each of the last three years.
Maya is currently on a waiting list for Iowa’s Medicaid Home and Community Based Services waiver — a program that could offset some of those costs. Samantha applied in March 2024. As of the time of our conversation, she had been waiting nearly two years, and the list had not moved meaningfully. “I check the portal every week,” she said. “Every week it’s the same.”
What this has meant for retirement savings is stark. Between 2020 and 2023, Samantha contributed an average of just 3% of her salary to her 401(k) — enough to capture her employer’s 2% match, but little more. She had intended to increase contributions after Marcus found steadier work. The cosigned loan default ended that plan before it started.
Looking Toward Social Security — and What She Sees
With $41,000 in retirement savings at 43, Samantha is acutely aware that Social Security will need to do heavy lifting in her retirement. She has looked at her Social Security statement online and told me her estimated benefit at full retirement age (67, for someone born in 1982) is currently projected at approximately $1,680 per month — assuming she continues earning at her current rate.
She had mapped this out herself — the numbers on her legal pad extended into a rough projection of what retirement might look like at different claiming ages. According to the Social Security Administration, claiming at 62 rather than 67 results in a permanent reduction of up to 30% for those born after 1959. Samantha knows the math. She’s also not sure she can afford to wait.
“If I claim at 62, I lose almost $500 a month forever,” she told me, tracing a figure with her pen. “But if I claim at 70, I need to survive on what I have until then. I don’t know how I do that with what’s in the account right now.”
Where She Stands Now, and What She’s Sitting With
Samantha told me she has increased her 401(k) contribution to 6% of her salary as of January 2026 — a meaningful step, she acknowledged, but one that she’s starting nearly two decades later than she wished. At that contribution rate, with a 2% employer match and an assumed 6% annual return, she would have approximately $285,000 by age 67. That, combined with her projected Social Security benefit, would give her roughly $3,000 per month in retirement income.
Whether that is enough depends on Maya. Samantha does not know what level of support her daughter will need as an adult. She has researched Special Needs Trusts and ABLE accounts — she showed me a printed summary from the ABLE National Resource Center — but has not yet taken formal steps. “That’s the next thing,” she said. “It’s always the next thing.”
She is not hopeless. She is, in fact, one of the more organized people I have interviewed for this column — someone who tracks her numbers religiously, even when the numbers are discouraging. But the scale of what she is managing has a compressive quality to it. There is no single catastrophic mistake. There is instead a sequence of reasonable-seeming decisions that stacked against her, each one narrowing the margin for the next.
As I left the diner, Samantha was still at the table, yellow legal pad open, working through something. I didn’t interrupt her. She looked less like someone in crisis than someone doing the hard, private work of figuring out where to go from exactly where she is.
That, perhaps more than any single number in her folder, is what stayed with me.
Related: He Got a Raise and Thought He Was Set — Then the IRS Bill Arrived and His Retirement Math Fell Apart
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