Most Americans plan to keep on working after they retire. Yet, few retirees work.<\/p>\n
That finding, from a recent survey, illustrates a perennial gap between expectations and reality for American retirees.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Roughly three-quarters of American workers plan to work for pay\u00a0after\u00a0they retire, according to the\u00a02026 Retirement Confidence Survey\u00a0from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. But only 31% of retirees are actually working, the survey found.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In\u00a0previous\u00a0EBRI\u00a0surveys going back to 1999, the finding is remarkably consistent. Year after year, between 70% and 80% of workers say they expect to continue working and drawing pay after they retire.\u00a0Yet, the share of retirees who work has never ranged higher than 34%.\u00a0<\/p>\n
False hopes\u00a0about working in retirement speak to fundamental misunderstandings about retirement and the labor market, experts say.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Most of us don’t retire on our own terms<\/p>\n
Many American workers imagine themselves easing into retirement\u00a0at their own pace:\u00a0Cutting back their hours, working part-time or remotely, or staying on as a consultant to the company that once employed them full-time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Other workers imagine they will keep working full-time well into their retirement years, drawing a salary into their 70s, working until they drop.<\/p>\n
In reality, though, most workers don\u2019t get to\u00a0retire on their own terms. Retirement often arrives suddenly and unexpectedly, triggered by health setbacks or corporate downsizing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
And once you\u2019re retired, returning to the workforce is seldom easy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople do expect to gradually transition by reducing hours, but what ends up happening is,\u00a0they end up stopping completely,\u201d\u00a0said\u00e2\u0080\u00afCraig Copeland, director of wealth benefits research at EBRI, the research and education nonprofit, in an April interview with USA TODAY.<\/p>\n
In many cases, to keep working in retirement, \u201cyou\u2019re going to have to find a whole new job,\u201d Copeland said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s hard to find a whole new job when you\u2019re older.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
When work is part of your retirement plan<\/p>\n
Working in retirement sounds like an oxymoron: In theory, you\u2019re either working or retired, not both.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The persistent desire to work in retirement, voiced in the EBRI survey and others, seems to reflect a pervasive hope among American workers that they can fund their retirement by continuing to work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Many American workers fear they aren\u2019t saving enough.\u00a0According to EBRI, roughly two-fifths of workers\u00a0lack confidence\u00a0in their financial security through retirement.\u00a0Retirement confidence\u00a0has been trending lower in recent years, a time of elevated inflation and myriad economic\u00a0uncertainties.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The EBRI survey draws on responses from 2,544 Americans in January.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the EBRI report, 75% of workers said they expect to leverage work as a source of income in retirement. Paid work ranks fourth among all expected income sources in retirement\u00a0on\u00a0the survey, after Social Security, workplace\u00a0and personal\u00a0retirement savings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s one of the ways that they\u2019re planning for retirement, and that is to continue to work and bring in income,\u201d Copeland said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet,\u00a0only 27% of\u00a0current\u00a0retirees report that they are drawing income from paid work.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Working in retirement is harder than it sounds<\/p>\n
One barrier to working in retirement is the relative scarcity of part-time work: Easing from a full-time to part-time schedule in a professional field is not as easy as it might sound, Copeland said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another problem is the difficulty older Americans have in finding new jobs.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cRe-entering employment can be very difficult when you\u2019re an older\u00a0jobseeker,\u201d said\u00a0Maura Porcelli, senior director of workforce at the National Council on Aging, speaking to USA TODAY in April.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Other retirement surveys show the extent to which Americans count on paid employment to fund their retirement.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a\u00a0recent report\u00a0from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, 48% of pre-retirement Americans said they plan to work in retirement, while 32% said they did not, with another 19% unsure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMany workers are planning to work in retirement for financial and healthy aging-related reasons,\u201d\u00a0said\u00e2\u0080\u00afCatherine Collinson, CEO of the Transamerica Center, in an April interview.\u00a0\u201cHowever, the experience of retirees shows that life happens,\u201d including\u00a0health issues, family responsibilities or job loss that pushes people\u00a0abruptly out of the workforce.<\/p>\n
Some of the conflicting data, Collinson said,\u00a0may\u00a0reflect\u00a0disparate\u00a0societal attitudes about retirement. For example: If a corporate worker takes a retirement package, lives in retirement for a year or two and then lands a full-time job in a related field, is that person still retired?\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSemantically, when people self-identify as \u2018retired,\u2019 are they supporting a societal expectation that they are no longer working?\u201d\u00a0she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Here’s why American retirees return to work<\/p>\n
American\u00a0retirees continue to work for a variety of reasons:\u00a0to stay active and\u00a0engaged, to postpone drawing Social Security or spending down retirement savings,\u00a0to make ends meet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Recent evidence suggests more retirees are working out of necessity. A February\u00a0report\u00a0from AARP found that 7% of American retirees had recently \u201cunretired,\u201d reentering the labor force. The most common reason\u00a0was to make more money.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI think right now we\u2019re in this economic uncertainty zeitgeist,\u201d said Carly Roszkowski, vice president of financial resilience programming at AARP, in an April interview.\u00a0\u201cPeople are worried about outliving their retirement savings. They\u2019re worried about the cost of gas, the cost of groceries.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a perfect world, Roszkowski said, retirees would work\u00a0not\u00a0because they\u00a0need\u00a0to,\u00a0but\u00a0because they\u00a0want\u00a0to.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people feel that they still have a lot left to give,\u201d she said. \u201cThey want to be challenged, they want to feel purpose, they want to give back.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Planning to work in retirement? Don’t count on it.<\/p>\n
Reporting by Daniel de Vis\u00e9, USA TODAY \/ USA TODAY<\/p>\n
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most Americans plan to keep on working after they retire. Yet, few retirees work. That finding, from a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[84,1319,4176,90566,50,4174,4175,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-649883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-consumer","tag-finance","tag-nation-world","tag-news","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}