Retire? Older Americans plan to work until they drop

(Bloomberg Business) — It’s the retirement elephant in the room: How much do you need to be financially secure if you stop working? The answer, from a pool of workers of all ages, was a median of $1 million, according to a new report. Thirty percent of those surveyed said it would be double that. While most people said their required nest egg was just a guess, those numbers would be a daunting goal for most Americans. But then, most people don’t plan to stop working.

Twenty percent of American workers expect to stay in their current position or a similar one until they can’t work any longer, according to a report out today from the Transamerica Center for RetirementStudies (TCRS) that surveyed 4,550 full and part-time workers. Another 41 percent hope to cut their hours when they’re older, or work in a less demanding, or more satisfying, position at their company—even though relatively few workers say their employers offer such options. Only 21 percent plan to walk out the office door when they hit a certain age (14 percent) or a saving goal (7 percent). 

In the survey, 82 percent of workers in their sixties or older said they expect to, or are, working past 65, and don’t plan to stop. A majority of them do it for health coverage or because they need the money. For workers in their fifties, 59 percent have no plans to retire before 65, or retire at all. For forty-somethings it’s 61 percent.

Workers in their 40s feel particularly pinched. Twenty- seven percent said they “have not yet begun to recover (18 percent) or may never recover (9 percent) from the Great Recession.”  While overallretirement confidence is very close to where it was in the 2007 survey (it’s been done annually since 1998) it has slipped from 2014, when 64 percent of people surveyed felt confident about being able to fully retire in comfort. This year, an overall 59 percent of people are confident, and just ten percent are “very” confident they’ll have a comfortable retirement.