New poll results from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research suggest a major disconnect between when individuals plan to retire – or not retire – and the realities of aging in the workforce.
The poll finds that nearly half of U.S. adults say they are not financially prepared for retirement and nearly a quarter (23%) of workers, including nearly one in five of those over 50, who say they never plan to retire.
But reluctance to retire is far from universal, or even widespread, according to AP-NORC. They also report that 74% of those they polled said that they do expect to retire, and 32% of respondents say they expect to retire before 65. What’s more, 54% of adults and 68% of those age 50 and older consider themselves at least somewhat ready to do so.
Not surprisingly, money has a lot to do with the decision to keep working for many, the AP notes. Experts say illness, injury, layoffs and caregiving responsibilities often force older workers to leave their jobs sooner than they’d like, the AP emphasizes.
When asked how financially comfortable they feel about retirement, 14% of Americans under the age of 50 and 29% over 50 say they feel “extremely or very prepared,” according to the poll. Another 4 in 10 older adults say they feel “somewhat prepared,” while a third feel “unprepared,” the AP data shows. By comparison, 56% of younger adults – those ages 18-49 – say they don’t feel prepared for retirement.
Among those who are fully retired, the AP poll shows that 38% said they felt “very or extremely prepared” when they retired, while 25% said they felt “not very or not at all prepared.”
Interestingly enough, not everyone thinks that staying in the workforce is a bad thing. AP-NORC further reports that 39% of Americans think that it is “mostly a good thing” for people to stay in the workforce longer, and 45% think it is good for the U.S. economy. Furthermore, they say that nearly three times as many Americans age 50 and older think that working longer is a good thing rather than bad thing for their careers – 42% vs. 15%. And AP-NORC is not alone in that finding, according to Ann Marsh in Financial Planning’s “Why Retire? 10 Reasons Clients Should Keep Working.” She writes that of retirement, “Many planners have found that some clients – often among the very active baby boomer generation – aren’t having it.”
There are financial planners who espouse staying in the workforce for certain reasons, Marsh writes, including:
- family needs;
- the need to retain health insurance;
- fear of the effects of losing a spouse and the spouse’s income; and
- failure of business owners to put a succession plan in place.
There are less tangible reasons as well, according to Marsh, such as:
- the need for a sense of purpose;
- the need to be productive;
- the need to be needed;
- the desire to accomplish significant work.
The AP-NORC nationwide survey of 1,423 adults was conducted in February 2019 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, designed to be representative of the U.S. population.
