Survey Identifies Top Retirement Dreams and Fears – FEDweek
Travel is the most common dream for retirement, followed by spending more time with family and friends and pursuing hobbies, a survey has found, while the most common fears involve outliving savings and declining health.
The hopes were cited much more often than the fears in a survey of some 10,000 workers by the TransAmerica Center for Retirement Studies, in which respondents could select any of a list that applied to them. For example, while 65 percent dream of travel, 42 percent worry about outliving their investments.
On the dreams side, spending more time with family friends and pursuing hobbies were cited by 59 and 51 percent, while on the bottom end 5 percent said they don’t have any retirement dreams. Between them were dreams such as volunteer work, caring for family or starting one’s own business.
Close behind outliving savings on the fears side were declining health and the prospects that Social Security benefits will be reduced by the time they retire, while 10 percent said they had no retirement fears. In between were fears related to the top two, such as not being able to meet financial needs and cognitive decline.
Reflecting concerns about finances, “Almost half of workers (49 percent) expect to retire after age 65 or do not plan to retire. Nearly three in 10 expect to retire before age 65 (29 percent) and another 23 percent expect to retire at age 65,” it said. The pandemic changed the retirement plans of about a third, it added, with those planning to delay retirement outnumbering those planning to advance it by more than two to one.
Also, “More than half or workers (57 percent) plan to work in retirement, either on a full-time (20 percent) or part-time (37 percent) basis. Twenty-seven percent do not plan to work in retirement and 17 percent are “not sure.”
