You could be living in poverty before you’re 60

At 60 you probably plan to be nearing retirement, maybe spending time with grandkids and reflecting on a full life — but odds are, that full life will include at least a short struggle of living in poverty.

By the time they turn 60, nearly 4 in 5 Americans will have struggled with some kind of economic hardship, Chris Ingraham and Emily Badger reported for The Washington Post. This includes unemployment, reliance on a government program for the poor or living in poverty for a year.

That means that 80 percent of Americans will struggle financially during their lives. But it's more than struggling, it's the kind of financial hardships most people think they will never experience, Washington University sociologist Mark Rank explained.

"Rather than an uncommon event," Rank says, "poverty was much more common than many people had assumed once you looked over a long period of time."

However, the data also suggests that there is a greater degree of upward mobility than many have imagined. By age 60, Americans also have a 70 percent chance of having been in the top 20 percent of income and an 11 percent chance of being in the top 1 percent, according to The Washington Post.

Rank and his colleagues have been studying the economic mobility of families and individuals, using data from as far back as 1968 to understand the constant flux many are in, The Washington Post reported.

To find out your odds of experiencing poverty at any age, check out this graph from The Washington Post.