When to Retire, Reconsidered
"Overall, 37% of full-time employed adults of all ages say they have thought in the past year about postponing their eventual retirement. This proportion swells to 52% among fulltime workers ages 50 to 64. Members of this so-called "Threshold Generation" are twice as likely as younger workers to say they never plan to retire (16% vs. 8%)."
Moreover, the Thresholders who do plan to retire someday say they plan to keep working, on average, until they are age 66 -- when they would be four years older than the age at which current retirees age 65 or older report that they stopped working.
The worries of the Threshold Generation are rooted in reality: Among all adults, it is the Threshold Generation that has seen the value of their investments decline the most in the past year. About three-quarters of adults ages 50 to 64 say they lost money in mutual funds, individual stocks or retirement accounts such as a 401(k)s, compared with barely half of those younger than age 50 (76% vs. 54%).
The Pew Research survey also finds that it may not be how much you earn but how much you lost in the investment market meltdown that determines whether you are re-thinking your retirement plans. Among the Threshold Generation as well as among other age groups, higher-income earners are only slightly less likely than lower-income adults to have considered postponing retirement. But regardless of income or age, those who have lost 40% or more of their investment nest eggs are roughly twice as likely as those who haven't lost money in the market meltdown to say they have thought about delaying their eventual exit from the workforce.
The heightened inclination to delay retirement appears to be driven in part by the current recession, but it is also in sync with longer-term labor market trends. The labor force participation rate of those ages 65 and older has increased from 12.9% in 2000 to 16.8% in 2008.1 A similar trend is also evident this decade among members of the Threshold Generation.
Working members of the Threshold Generation are the least confident of any age group that they will have enough money to make it through their retirement years. Barely two-in-ten (21%) of those ages 50 to 64 say they are "very confident" that they have enough income and assets to tide them over, compared with 37% of fulltime workers younger than age 30 and 40% of those ages 65 and older.
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