Roughly 57% of Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 have less than $100,000 saved for retirement, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. But the number that stunned me when I first read Duane LaRoche’s message was not a percentage. It was a single digit: zero.
I found Duane the way I find a lot of my subjects — through a Facebook group. He had posted in a community called “Retirement Reality Check,” a group technically aimed at people nearing or past retirement age. Duane, at 55, was among the younger members. His post was blunt: “Anyone else out here with no savings, debt, and a kid to raise alone? Asking because I need to know I’m not the only one.” Forty-seven people commented within six hours. I sent him a direct message the same evening.
We spoke by phone a week later, then again in person when I drove through Des Moines in early February 2026. He met me at a diner near the freight yard where his rig gets serviced. He arrived in a flannel jacket, ordered black coffee, and pulled out a legal pad covered in handwritten numbers. That pad — that instinct to quantify his own situation even when the numbers were painful — told me everything about who Duane LaRoche is.
The Weight of a Graduate Degree That Didn’t Pay Off
Duane spent three years in the late 1990s pursuing a master’s degree in urban planning at Iowa State University. He was in his late twenties, ambitious, and convinced a graduate credential would open doors in city development work. It cost him approximately $34,000 in federal loans at the time. With deferred payments and periods of forbearance during lean years, that balance had grown to $47,200 by the time we met.
The urban planning career never materialized. Duane bounced between municipal contract work and temp jobs for several years before a friend helped him get his commercial driver’s license in 2004. He’s been driving long-haul routes ever since — currently earning roughly $58,400 a year before taxes, working for a regional carrier out of Des Moines.
“I kept telling myself the loans were manageable and retirement was far away,” Duane told me. “That’s a thing you say when you’re 35. Then you say it when you’re 40. Then you’re 55 and you realize you’ve been lying to yourself for twenty years.”
The income-driven repayment plan he’s currently enrolled in requires a monthly payment of $312. That’s money that has never gone toward a 401(k) or IRA — and his employer does not offer a retirement match.
Raising a Child Alone on a Single Trucking Income
Duane’s daughter, Maya, is 13. Her mother left the household in 2019 and has provided no financial support since. Duane told me he pursued child support through the courts but described the process as exhausting and ultimately fruitless — the order exists on paper, but enforcement has produced almost nothing.
Maya lives with Duane full time. He described their dynamic with visible pride and visible worry in almost equal measure. He pays $1,150 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Des Moines. Between rent, groceries, Maya’s school fees, his truck insurance, and the loan payment, his monthly fixed expenses run to roughly $3,600. After taxes, his take-home is approximately $3,850 a month. That leaves around $250 in breathing room — and no path to savings as things currently stand.
The guilt piece matters here. Duane said more than once that when he has a small surplus in a given month — a good week of mileage bonuses, a slow billing cycle — he spends it on Maya. A pair of basketball shoes. A class trip deposit. Not recklessly, but deliberately. He knows it’s pulling from his future, and he makes the choice anyway.
The Social Security Math He’s Running in His Head
When I asked Duane what his retirement plan actually was, he didn’t hesitate. He picked up the legal pad and started reading numbers aloud.
He’d pulled his Social Security statement from SSA.gov several months earlier. Based on his earnings history, his projected monthly benefit at age 62 is approximately $1,410. At his full retirement age of 67, that number rises to roughly $1,980. If he waits until 70, it climbs to approximately $2,460.
The difference between claiming at 62 and waiting until 70 is $1,050 per month — more than $12,000 a year. For someone with no other retirement income, that gap is the difference between poverty and a modest but stable life. According to the Social Security Administration, benefits claimed at 62 are permanently reduced by up to 30% compared to full retirement age benefits.
“I know I should wait as long as possible,” Duane told me. “I know the math. But Maya is 13. I might have to keep working until she’s through high school, maybe college. I can’t retire at 62 even if I want to. But I also can’t promise I’ll last as a driver until 70. My back is already a problem.”
A Turning Point — or the Beginning of One
After his Facebook post drew dozens of responses, Duane said something shifted. He started attending a free financial literacy workshop offered through a Des Moines public library program in October 2025. The sessions weren’t tailored to his specific situation, but they gave him a vocabulary for what he was dealing with.
He also learned, for the first time, that he might qualify for an income-driven repayment plan that caps his student loan payment based on discretionary income — and that forgiveness could be possible after 20 years of payments under the SAVE plan, depending on whether that program survives ongoing legal challenges. His current servicer had never walked him through those options.
The workshop also surfaced a detail Duane hadn’t considered: at age 55, he still has roughly 10 working years before the typical retirement window. If he were to open and consistently contribute to a Solo 401(k) or a traditional IRA — even at $200 a month — the compounding effect over a decade, while modest, would be meaningfully better than nothing. He hadn’t opened either account yet when we spoke in February. But he said he’d been researching contribution limits online at night after Maya went to sleep.
Where Things Stand — and What Duane Knows About Himself
When I asked Duane to describe his financial situation in one sentence, he thought about it for a full ten seconds. “I’m behind,” he said. “Not because I was stupid. Because life went sideways and I kept thinking I’d fix it later.”
That self-awareness is real, and it’s relatively recent. He told me he spent most of his forties in a kind of financial avoidance — not opening statements, not logging into his loan servicer’s portal, not thinking concretely about what 65 would look like. The Facebook post in late 2025 was the first time he’d said the quiet part out loud in a public way. The response — 47 people saying “same” — cracked something open.
His immediate goals, as he described them to me, are specific and modest:
- Confirm his current loan repayment plan is the lowest available payment given his income
- Open an IRA before the April 2026 tax deadline and put in whatever he can manage — even if it’s $500
- Request an updated Social Security earnings statement and bookmark it for annual review
- Have a conversation with Maya about money — the real version, not the sanitized one
That last one surprised me. He brought it up unprompted. “She’s 13,” he said. “She’s old enough to understand that money is real and it runs out. I don’t want her to learn that at 55 the way I did.”
I left the diner in Des Moines thinking about that legal pad. The handwritten numbers on it weren’t a plan, not yet. But they were evidence that Duane LaRoche had stopped looking away. At 55, with debt and a daughter and a back that’s already protesting, that may be exactly where change starts — not with a windfall or a perfect strategy, but with someone finally writing the numbers down and refusing to pretend they aren’t real.
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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