Roughly one in three Americans under 35 say they expect to receive little or nothing from Social Security when they retire, according to estimates drawn from annual Gallup polling. For workers like Brittany Holloway, that skepticism isn’t abstract — it shows up on every pay stub.
When I sat down with Brittany at a coffee shop near her apartment in East Nashville on a Thursday afternoon in March, she pulled out her phone almost immediately. She wanted to show me a TikTok she’d bookmarked — a 45-second video claiming Social Security would be “gone by 2033.” She’d watched it four times. She still wasn’t sure what to believe.
Brittany is 25 years old, works full-time as a dental assistant, and earns $17 an hour — a wage she worked hard to reach. She was the first in her family to complete any college coursework, finishing a dental assisting program at a community college in Middle Tennessee. She carries $8,000 in student loans and $3,000 in credit card debt from a card she opened at 19. She tracks her spending obsessively but feels like she’s always one unexpected expense away from falling behind.
What she hadn’t fully grasped, until we talked, was exactly how much she was already contributing to the program — and what the current projections actually mean for someone her age.
What Brittany Sees on Her Pay Stub — and What She Doesn’t Understand
Every worker in the United States who earns a paycheck has 6.2% of their wages withheld for Social Security, up to the annual wage cap (set at $176,100 in 2025). An additional 1.45% goes toward Medicare. Employers match both contributions. For Brittany, working roughly 40 hours a week at $17 an hour, that translates to gross annual earnings of about $35,360 — and a Social Security withholding of approximately $2,192 per year from her check alone.
“I see ‘FICA’ on my stub every week and I just always assumed that was taxes,” Brittany told me, stirring her coffee. “I didn’t know it was specifically Social Security. Nobody ever explained what that line actually meant.”
She wasn’t wrong to be confused. Social Security’s funding structure is genuinely counterintuitive: today’s workers don’t pay into a personal savings account. Their contributions fund current retirees. The promise made to today’s workers is that future workers will fund them in turn. It’s a pay-as-you-go system — and for many young workers watching demographic shifts and news headlines, that compact feels uncertain.
The Trust Fund Question That Keeps Gen Z Up at Night
The TikTok Brittany showed me wasn’t entirely wrong — it was just incomplete. The Social Security Board of Trustees has projected that the combined trust funds could be depleted by 2035 under current conditions. After that point, incoming payroll taxes would still cover roughly 83% of scheduled benefits — a significant cut, but not a zeroing out of the program.
“So it’s not gone, it’s just… less?” Brittany asked when I walked her through it. She looked genuinely relieved for about three seconds before adding: “But 83 cents on the dollar is still a big deal when you don’t have savings.”
Congress has historically stepped in before trust fund depletion has occurred — most recently with significant amendments in 1983, which included raising the retirement age and making some benefits taxable. Whether a similar fix materializes this decade is a legislative question, not a certainty. What’s certain for Brittany is that she’s 42 years away from her full retirement age and cannot opt out of contributing in the meantime.
What Her Contributions Actually Build Over Time
One thing Brittany hadn’t considered was that her eventual Social Security benefit isn’t based on total contributions — it’s calculated from her highest 35 years of indexed earnings. Workers with lower lifetime wages receive a proportionally higher return relative to what they paid in, by design. The formula is weighted to favor lower earners.
For someone at Brittany’s current income level, the math is genuinely more favorable than she assumed. The average monthly Social Security retirement benefit as of early 2025 was approximately $1,927, according to SSA benefit data — though actual amounts vary widely by earnings history.
When I explained the weighted formula, Brittany paused. “Wait — so because I make less, they give me back more of what I put in?” she asked. That’s roughly accurate, I told her, though benefit amounts are ultimately tied to total lifetime earnings. She sat back in her chair and said, “Nobody told me that. Every video I’ve watched made it sound like it just disappears.”
The Contradictions She Lives With Every Day
Brittany’s financial life isn’t just about Social Security. She faces the same triple-pressure that defines early adulthood in high-rent cities: debt, a modest wage, and the sense that every financial decision is a zero-sum trade-off. Nashville’s median one-bedroom rent crossed $1,600 in 2025, according to apartment market trackers. On $17 an hour — roughly $2,500 take-home per month after taxes and withholdings — she’s left with very little margin.
“I see people online saying pay off debt first, then I see someone saying max out your 401k for the employer match, then someone else is saying the whole stock market is rigged anyway,” she told me, laughing with a kind of exhausted humor. “And I’m sitting here trying to figure out if I can afford to go to the dentist — which is funny because I work at a dentist.”
Her credit card carries an interest rate she described as “somewhere in the twenties” — common for cards issued to young adults with thin credit histories. Her student loans are federal, which means they carry fixed rates and income-driven repayment options she wasn’t fully aware existed until I mentioned them. She’s not in default on anything, but she’s also not making meaningful progress on the principal.
Leaving the Conversation With More Questions Than Answers
By the time we’d been talking for an hour, Brittany had pulled out a notes app on her phone and started typing. She wanted to know about her Social Security statement — she didn’t know she could view her projected benefits online through the SSA’s my Social Security portal. She wanted to understand what happens to those contributions if she changes jobs, moves states, or leaves the workforce temporarily to care for a family member someday.
“I think I always assumed this was someone else’s problem — like, old people’s problem,” she said, with a kind of quiet frankness. “But it’s already my money. It’s already happening to me right now.”
That recognition — that Social Security isn’t a distant abstraction but a present financial reality — felt like the actual turning point of our conversation. Not a resolution, exactly. Brittany left without a plan. She’s still figuring out whether to attack the credit card debt or build a small emergency fund first. She still doesn’t know if Social Security will be solvent when she turns 67 in 2043. Nobody does.
What changed was smaller and more durable than a plan: she stopped seeing the FICA line on her pay stub as money that just evaporates, and started seeing it as something she might someday be able to account for. In a financial life as tight as hers, that kind of clarity is genuinely hard to come by.
Walking out into the March afternoon, she said the last thing I wrote down: “I just want to feel like I’m not behind. Like, maybe I’m not as far behind as I think.” She said it more to herself than to me. I didn’t answer. There wasn’t a clean answer to give.
Related: The Medicare Deduction That Quietly Shrinks Your Social Security Check Every Single Month
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