But most people are excited to redeem themselves, thanks to a longer life expectancy.
According to a new study from Allianz Life, 32% of Americans regret major life choices like profession, college choice, and employer.
Read the full article at TIME.
Retirement is too long. We haven’t adjusted to longer lifespans and greater physical and mental capabilities in our later years. As a result, the notion of retiring at 65 is outmoded for most—and even dangerous for many, who can’t possibly save enough over their working lives to cover a 30+-year retirement.
I ask people all the time, “If you had thirty extra years in your life, where would you put them?” No one ever says, “I’d make old age longer.”
Yet this is precisely what we have done. Life expectancy nearly doubled in the 20th century and without giving it a second thought, we collectively tacked on all the added years to the end. Only retirement got longer.
Instead of thinking imaginatively about the implications of lives twice as long as our ancestors, we wring our hands about the millions of people who will be unprepared for decades-long retirements and worry about how governments can afford to support populations top-heavy with old people. The idea that we should buckle down and save for 30 to 40 year retirements is utterly misguided. For one, it’s probably impossible for the vast majority of Americans.
Many Workers are unable to finance 20+ year retirements
Second, extremely long retirements aren’t good for individuals or societies.
The key obstacle standing in the way of creatively redesigning life is that we humans are creatures of culture, and life expectancy increased so fast that culture hasn’t had a chance to catch up. A decade-and-a-half into the 21st century, our lives are still guided by the same norms and social scripts that guided our parents and grandparents. It once made sense to get all your education early in life, work hard while you find a mate and rear your children. It made sense to retire at 65 in 1933 when Social Security was put in place. If you were lucky enough to survive to 65 (most people didn’t) getting a few years off at the end of life made sense.
But these norms no longer make sense for lives doubled in length—and in which good health lasts much further into people’s later years.
Every fundamental aspect of life will change—the nature of family, education, politics, financial planning—and none more so than work.
In coming years, people need to—and many will want to—work longer, a lot longer. The good news is that working longer promises scores of benefits for individuals and societies. Engaging in productive activities outside of the home is associated with cognitive, social and physical benefits in addition to the more obvious financial benefits.
Work improves cognitive functioning
With innovative financial products, we can work differently, alternating between working full and part-time. Education should not stop in our early 20s and we should save for intermittent returns to universities, pursuit of nanodegrees, and incentivize more employer-based training that includes seasoned workers, as well as incentivize HR benefits from employers that fund fellowship/retraining years.
We can work many more years yet fewer days per week. We will no longer have to face raising our children at the very same time we reach the peak of our careers; rather we can cycle in and out of full and part-time work, allowing parents of young children to finally achieve that elusive concept of work-life balance.
Workforces are growing more age diverse than ever before in history and the glimmers from research on mixed-aged work teams looks like they outperform all-young and all-old teams. Matching the speed and flexibility of youth with the experience and stability of the old will make work more enjoyable and more profitable in the age of longevity.
As soon as we wake up and realize that longer lives afford us the unprecedented chance to redesign all of life, we can begin to write a life script for lives that last a century. One thing for sure, it won’t be a story about old age, it will be a story about long life.
Source: BlackRock Retirement Institute
Research shows that most retirees and pre-retirees tend to underestimate how long they might live. Huge mistake. If you build a nest egg and plan to spend it down on the assumption you’ll live to 85 but you make it 95, those extra 10 years could be grim. Fortunately, a new easy-to-use tool can give you a better sense of how long you might be around, which can help you better gauge how much you should save during your career and also ensure you don’t outlive what you’ve managed to put away.
Read the full article at Money.
You may have long pictured homeownership as a cornerstone of your retirement. But baby boomers are increasingly renting instead. From 2005 to 2015, the number of renters ages 60 to 64 nearly doubled, rising from 1.3 million households to 2.5 million, reports Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Read the full article at Money.
An overwhelming majority (93 percent) of retirees recently surveyed say their life is as good or better than before retirement. That’s one result reported in a new study from Merrill Lynch titled “Leisure in Retirement: Beyond the Bucket List.”
The survey found most retirees are happy to be free from the daily grind, the pressure of juggling family and work, alarm clocks, deadlines and never-ending emails. Nine out of ten (92 percent) say retirement gives them the freedom and flexibility to do whatever they want, and on their own terms.
Read the full article at CBS MoneyWatch.
Researchers at the Stanford Center on Longevity have found in a new report that the ways in which elderly people process high-arousal emotions, such as anger and excitement, is in part responsible for their heightened susceptibility to fraud.
Read the full article at The Stanford Daily.
Why is the American economy stuck in low gear?
Among economists, two major culprits get most of the attention. First is anemic productivity growth.But little controversy shadows the second major factor: the demographics of an aging population.
Read the full article at The New York Times.
Having enough money to retire is the number one financial worry for Americans. They say so in poll after poll.
So you might think retirement is something the presidential candidates would be addressing. All three major party candidates left do talk about protecting Social Security — something most voters like to hear. But actually, none of the candidates so far is talking about a bold, new approach to the problem that’s rapidly gaining traction both abroad and here in the U.S. at the state level.
That is — laws that force both large and small businesses to set up retirement plans for all their workers and to automatically enroll their workers into these plans.
Read the full article at National Public Radio (NPR).
With retirement, it is important to consider how declining cognitive skills associated with aging will make it increasingly difficult to self-manage your investment and withdrawal decisions.
Read the full article at Forbes.
An appeal to emotions like excitement or anger is a key persuasion tactic used by fraudsters to mislead the elderly.
That’s the key finding in a new report from the Stanford Center on Longevity. Excitement and anger – known as “high arousal” emotions – can lead to risky decision-making compared with “low-arousal” emotions, such as feeling depressed, bored or tired.
Read the full article at Stanford News Service.