My Biggest Retirement Mistake: Skipping a 401(k) in My Last Job

A longtime long-term care aide had a pension from a past job — and thought that was all she could get

Reyna Gobel,

AARP

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Published September 24, 2025

a woman stands in the kitchen of her apartment, with the living room and window in the background

In 2014, retiree Yvonne Davis, 77, moved from the Buffalo, New York, area to an apartment in Brooklyn to be close to one of her daughters. However, the move greatly increased Davis' cost of living.

Juan C. Giraldo

Amore Philip had a question. I had just met the New York City public relations executive at a midtown Manhattan media party, and she had just learned that I regularly write for AARP about people’s retirement regrets.

“Is it a retirement mistake if my mom didn’t have a 401(k) for the last nine years she worked?” she asked. Her mother, Yvonne Davis, 77, had recently left her job at an assisted living facility in the Bronx that didn’t offer a retirement plan.

“Is she doing OK?” I asked. “How is she doing financially?”

“She gets by with a previous pension and Social Security, but the extra money sure could have come in handy,” Philip said. Especially since Davis’ living costs rose considerably when the longtime Buffalo-area resident resettled in New York City in 2014 to be closer to her daughter.

What’s Your Biggest Retirement Mistake?

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AARP Members Edition wants to hear about your retirement regrets. A mistimed exit from the office? A move to the wrong place? A relationship you gave up? Spending too much, or too little? Share your story at retirement@aarp.org and we might feature it in this series.

That sounded like a retirement mistake, alright. Philip agreed to introduce me to her mother so I could learn more.

‘I’m already getting it’

I wanted to know why Davis decided to forgo saving for retirement in the last stretch of her working life. It turns out that even if her final employer had offered a 401(k) — and I confirmed independently that it didn’t — she didn’t think she would be eligible for it.

Prior to the assisted-living job, Davis had worked for 18 years as a nursing assistant at a nursing home in the Buffalo suburbs. A few years after that facility closed in 2007, she moved in with her son in Pennsylvania, and a few years after that to Brooklyn, where Philip lives. She had a pension from the nursing home that she received as part of a buyout package, but she needed additional income to tide her over until she was ready to retire.

Her nearly two decades at the nursing home, caring daily for residents who were ill, frail and often unhappy, had been stressful. “It was so much, you know, personal complications with the residents,” Davis says. “I didn’t want to do that again.”

She found what she was looking for at an assisted living facility in the Bronx that was hiring food service staff. An accomplished home cook (especially of Caribbean food — Davis grew up in Antigua, and her late second husband was Jamaican), she liked the idea of working in the kitchen and having less arduous interactions with residents.

Davis didn’t ask if her new employer offered a retirement plan — because, she says, she believed a worker was only eligible for one retirement benefit, and hers was the nursing home pension.

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“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.”

a woman in a bright dress stands on the roof of an apartment building

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.”

What the pro says

No matter how many jobs (and retirement plans) you’ve had, it’s crucial to understand your benefit options when you start a new one, Washo says.

“There are many options available to a person who’s previously ‘retired’ and wants additional income to bolster their savings,” he says. “The first thing to do is determine what’s available to you.”

Ask potential or new employers direct questions about their savings or pension plans. Workplaces that offer a 401(k) are required to give new hires a description of the plan within 90 days. And check your pay stubs: Many employers automatically enroll new hires in a retirement account, Washo notes, so “a percentage of your income may already be automatically deducted from your check.”

Max out on matching contributions from employers, he adds. Nearly 9 in 10 workplaces with retirement plans offer employer contributions, according to a March 2025 study from the Investment Company Institute, an association representing the asset management industry. A typical match might see your employer kick in up to half of your 401(k) contribution, up to a 6 percent savings rate — meaning you’re actually putting 9 percent of your pay toward retirement.

Don’t assume anything about retirement options based on the type of work you do or where you do it, he says: “There’s all sorts of levels of jobs that do have 401(k)s. It’s not just high-level positions that will offer one.”

If your job doesn’t offer a retirement plan, or if you are self-employed as a consultant or contractor, then do it yourself. Washo says it’s easy to set up a traditional or Roth IRA on your own. There are also accounts tailored for self-employed people, such as solo and SEP IRAs, but these can be more complex and may require the help of a financial professional.

Crucially, he adds, don’t stop saving just because you’re nearing the end of your working life. With lifespans increasing, more people are living 20, 30 or even 40 years in retirement, and that requires a robust nest egg.

"As long as you still have earned income, you can keep contributing,” Washo says. “I send out a lot of centenarian birthday cards to clients.”

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Reyna Gobel is a personal finance and wellness writer and author whose work has been published by The Atlantic, Reuters, Harvard health, WeightWatchers.com and Today.com.