Retirement savers may never have had it more difficult.

For decades, financial advisors routinely recommended an investment portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds. It was seen as a goldilocks formula, combiningpotential for growth with protection if stock prices fell.

But the interest rate on benchmark 10-year US government bondslong a core part of the everyday persons retirement portfoliois hovering near record lows at around 0.8%, with little chance of rising anytime soon. The Federal Reserve, seeking to give the economy a boost, is likely to keep yields near zero until at least 2023.

To be ready for retirement, most people are going to have to find a way to save more, take more investment risk, or work longer than they might have expected. The famed 60-40 portfolio, which has returned about 10% a year since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis, may generate returns of about half that in the coming years according to some projections.

This is the hardest investing environment a lot of people have ever had to face, says Ben Carlson, director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. At our firm, weve racked our brains forever about thiswhats the alternative? Is it dividend stocks? Is it corporate bonds, is it emerging market bonds? There really is no easy answer.

Treasury bonds have long performed an important job for investorstheyre pretty much the only asset that tends to increase in value when theres a panic, whether thats from a terrorist attack or a financial crisis. Giulio Renzi Ricci, senior investment strategist at Vanguard, says Treasuries still have a role to play as a shock absorber, and he continues to expect US government debt to be a haven when times get tough.

But once you account for inflation, government bonds have always been vulnerable to losing money. In inflation-adjusted terms, (using the CPI index, for example), 10-year Treasury securities are in negative territory, as theyve often been historically. And with the notes currently yielding less than 1%, their capacity for absorbing shocks has been greatly diminished.

Even a small drop in investment returns has immense impact onwhen, or whether, people can afford to retire. Imagine a 35-year-old investor who has socked away $50,000 and plans to put away $500 a month for the next 30 years. An annual return of 7% would result in a retirement portfolio worth more than $1 million when the person is 65. An annual return of 4% would result in holdings worth about half of that, around $513,000plus, three decades of inflation will eat into those returns, raising the risk that the person outlives their savings.

Finance professionals have mixed opinions on where to go from here.

As far as Jared Woodard is concerned, the 60-40 portfolio is dead. I came out with this thesis a year ago, and Im more confident than I was before, said Woodard, who heads the research investment committee at Bank of America.

He argues that such a conservative portfolio has pretty much always been a bad deal for investors: a dollar invested the entire US stock market in 1950 would be worth $1,763 now, while a dollar in a 60-40 portfolio would have only risen to about $535.

If investors cant afford to save more, they may instead dial up the risk, pushing more of their holdings into stocks (an 80-20 portfolio, perhaps), or swapping government bonds for corporate bonds and loans, emerging-market assets, or longer maturity debt. (Woodard thinks savers can take prudent risks by investing some of their money in things like corporate bonds and loans, higher yielding municipal debt, and even tech stocks, which have been a crowded trade for some time but remain one of the few places to find companies with decent earnings growth.)

But taking more risk has, well, risks. In swapping out Treasuries for riskier securities, youre diluting your diversification benefits, Vanguards Ricci says. Youre getting more expected return but for a higher level of risk.

If the stock market tanks just before a person retires, they might not be able to ride out the losses before theyre due to stop working.

Surprisingly, even as the hope for returns dwindles, investors in the US dont appear to be giving up on bonds. So far this year theyve put almost $20 billion into exchange-traded funds for Treasury debt, though thats on pace for the lowest annual total in four years, according to Eric Balchunas, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Corporate bond ETFs, meanwhile, have sucked in more than triple that amount. (Much of that money was probably trying to get in ahead of the Fed, which bought company debt ETFs for the first time ever. The central bank did so to keep the coronavirus pandemic from disrupting corporate financing markets.)

With Treasuries yielding so little, some investors have looked to gold as their crisis hedge. Gold ETFs have taken in $32.5 billion this year, blowing away the old annual record of $12 billion.

Research suggests that a lot of Americans are fairly risk-averse when it comes to their savings. In a Wells Fargo/Gallup survey about investment and retirement optimism, only 4% of the respondents said they were comfortable taking a lot of risk, while 46% said they wanted to take only a little risk. When it comes to investing, 59% said the fear of losing money was the emotion that had the biggest influence on their tolerance for risk.

If investors cant afford to save more and arent willing to dial up the risk, then they may plan to work longer. Indeed, almost 30% of people surveyed by financial advisor Edward Jones said they plan to delay retirement because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The trouble with this strategy is that people can overestimate their capacity to keep working. The average retirement age in the US is 61 and has barely budged in recent years. Thats five years younger than the age at which people, on average, expect to retire, according Gallup survey data of adults over age 18. Some may leave the workforce earlier than expected because of health problems, or to a look after a family member.

Older workers who lose or leave their jobs may find it difficult to find employment again, sometimes because of age discrimination. In this recession, customer-facing jobs in the retail or hospitality sectors may not be an option for older workers because they face greater Covid-19 health risks than younger employees.

I suspect a lot of aspiring retirees think theyre going to be able to work longer than theyre able to, said Robert Williams, a vice president at the Schwab Center for Financial Research.

Not saving enough for retirement has long been a problem for many Americans, but Williams says ultra-low interest rates are shining a light on this concern. (In his view, the 60-40 portfolio isnt dead, but he argues the investment staple needs to be adjusted, potentially with company debt instead of government debt, or more exposure to the stock market.)

Ritholtzs Carson, meanwhile, suspects ultra-low interest rates will encourage financial institutions to start marketing exotic stufffinancial products that use derivatives or leverage, as demand grows for anything with a hint a extra yield. Mostly, though, he expects that many peopleare just going to have to work longer, whether they want to or not, and rely pretty heavily on Social Security.

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With interest rates near record lows, retirement may have to wait - Quartz