Originally posted September 13, 2013 by Paula Aven Gladych on https://www.benefitspro.com
The number of Americans who expect to retire by age 65 has dropped dramatically since 1991, while the number who expect to retire after 70 has shot up, according to a report by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
One-quarter of workers in EBRI’s 2013 Retirement Confidence Survey said that the age at which they expect to retire has changed in the past year, and of those, 88 percent believe their expected retirement age has increased.
Twenty-two percent of all workers said they would postpone their retirement. The reality, however, is that even though those people want to work longer, health issues and their employers could prevent them from doing that.
In 1991, only 11 percent of workers expected to retire after age 65. Now that number is 36 percent, while 7 percent of those surveyed don’t expect to retire at all, according to EBRI.
The number of individuals who thought they could retire before age 65 also has decreased steadily over time.
In 1991, 19 percent of survey respondents thought they could retire before age 60 and 31 percent thought they would retire between ages 60 and 64. In 1998, those numbers were still high at 24 percent and 25 percent respectively.
By this year, only 9 percent of respondents thought they would be able to retire by age 60 and 14 percent thought they could do it by age 64.
Twenty-six percent of respondents said they expected to retire at age 70 or older, up from 9 percent in 1991 and 7 percent in 1998.
The Employee Benefit Research Institute is a private, nonpartisan research institute based in Washington, D.C. It focuses on health, savings, retirement and economic security issues.