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June 09, 2015 at 12:35 PM
(Bloomberg Business) — Peer pressure might start when you’re a kid, but it can continue right into adulthood — and even affect your retirement savings.
That’s according to a new survey, which found that either financial stress, feeling behind peers in saving and salary, or embarrassment over finances motivated almost a third of non- retirees to “make positive financial decisions.” Thirty-seven percent of those taking the survey felt peers were ahead of them either in terms of financial stability, current income, or saving for the future. That feeling was particularly strong among Gen X-ers and millennials, with 48 percent and 43 percent, respectively, feeling they “lagged behind most people their age.” Thirty-four percent of boomers felt the same way.
“For younger workers, everything’s a constant stream of sharing about what’s going on in their life and peers’ lives,” says Aron Levine, head of Merrill Edge, which commissioned the survey. “If they don’t seem to be doing as well as everyone else, they don’t want to share it and it adds to stress.” The good news, he says, is that this pressure “can lead to them taking some action because they don’t want to fall that far behind peers.”
The biannual survey, done by Braun Research, asked a nationally representative sample of 1,000 of the “mass affluent” — people from 18 to 68 with between $50,000 and $250,000 in household investable assets—about topics such as how they were planning for retirement, what they thought retirement would be like, and whether they’d be embarrassed if close friends or family knew all about things like their retirement savings, checking account balance, credit score, or discretionary spending.
The survey didn’t ask respondents for details on the positive financial decisions they made, but found many more people prioritizing saving for the future. Sixty-one percent of respondents said they are now saving more for the future, compared with 48 percent who said that a year ago. Respondents are now as likely to prioritize savings as they are to “having enough money to live comfortably today.”
