Half of Workers Believe Comfortable Retirement Out of Reach

“People who have a [plan through their employer] have a very easy way to save through payroll deduction and have tax incentives to do so,” Greenwald said. The report found that among those who don’t have access to a plan, if they were offered one and automatically enrolled, most would leave the deferral rate as is, whether it were set at 3% or 6%. Less than a quarter said they would decrease the 6% contribution.

“A lot of people understand deep down that they should be saving more and appreciate the automatic enrollment,” Greenwald said. “Nonetheless, some employers overestimate how many people will be upset” about the rate at which they are defaulted in, although most with a higher rate probably haven’t really seen a “revolution.”

With retirement rated as such a low priority, it’s not surprising to find that saving rates have declined since 2009. In 2009, 75% of workers said they or their spouse had saved for retirement, up from 66% in 2007; however, that level has slowly returned to 66%, the lowest levels since the survey began collecting data on respondents and their spouses.

Confidence in the ability to pay for medical expenses is low, but even basic expenses appear to be a hurdle some respondents don’t think they’ll be able to overcome. More than half of workers reported low levels of confidence in their ability to pay for medical care in retirement, and 29% said they were not too confident or not at all confident that they could pay for basic expenses. Long-term care is clearly a big concern for workers. Thirty-nine percent said they were not at all confident they could cover the cost of long-term care after they stopped working, and 23% said they were not too confident.

Workers are unlikely to ask for help they clearly need. EBRI found just 23% of workers and 28% of retirees have gone to a financial advisor for professional help. Of those, just over a quarter actually followed all the advice they received. Most reported they ignored at least part of the advice their advisor gave them.

Even though many respondents use professional advice selectively, Vanderhei said that people who look for more information, whether through an advisor or online tools, tend to have more appropriate savings rates. “Overall, those who do use these additional sources of information end up actually having much more realistic targets,” he said during the media briefing.

EBRI identified a number of expectations workers have about retirement. “The most significant trend in the 23-year history of the survey is the plan to work longer,” Greenwald said. The report found 22% of workers expect to postpone retirement, and since 1991, the percentage of workers who expect to retire after 65 has steadily increased from 11% to 36%.

The actual retirement age, however, has changed more slowly. Fourteen percent of retirees in 2013 said they retired after age 65, up from 8% in 1991.

“The second expectation is the plan to continue to work after retirement,” Greenwald said. “In some ways this is realistic—if you don’t save enough, you must work longer—but it can be risky if people use the expectation of longer work to justify not saving now.”

One of the dangers in planning to work longer or to work after they leave their primary career is that workers may find they simply aren’t able to continue working. “Almost half of retirees said they had to retire before they expected for reasons beyond their control,” Greenwald said. Those reasons include not just workers’ health (55%), but downsizing or closures at work (20%) and caregiving duties for other family members (23%). Just 7% of retirees gave a positive reason for retiring early.