Workers Keep Pushing Back Expected Retirement Age

Here’s the bad news: The age at which workers expect to retire is still slowly rising. Here’s the worse news: Those workers are being optimistic.

That’s the upshot of the latest study from the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI).

Twenty-five percent of workers in the 2013 Retirement Confidence Survey say the age at which they expect to retire has changed in the past year, and of those, the vast majority (88%) report that their expected retirement age has increased. This means that in 2013, 22% of all workers planned to postpone their retirement.

In 1991, just 11% of workers expected to retire at an age older than 65, but now 36% of workers report they expect to wait until after age 65 to retire — and 7% don’t plan to retire at all, according to the retirement Confidence Survey.

However, while the age at which workers expect to retire is slowly rising, the realities of retirement suggest that many of them may not be able to retire later. Additional findings from the 2013 Retirement Confidence Survey are available online at www.ebri.org.

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