Poll finds more boomers working past retirement

Susan Webb and her hus­band Bob hold their dog Max in their West Lib­erty, Iowa, home. An Asso­ci­ated Press-LifeGoesStrong.com poll finds a baby boom gen­er­a­tion plan­ning to work into retire­ment years, with 73 per­cent plan­ning to work past retire­ment, up from 67 per­cent this spring. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Char­lie Neibergall)

JENNIFER C. KERR

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — So much for kick­ing back at the lake house, long after­noons of golf or pretty much any­thing baby boomers had dreamed about in retire­ment. For many, the plan now calls for log­ging more hours at the office and renewed wor­ries about money, accord­ing to a new poll.

The Asso­ci­ated Press-LifeGoesStrong.com poll found a baby boom gen­er­a­tion plan­ning to work into retire­ment years — with 73 per­cent plan­ning to work past retire­ment, up from 67 per­cent this spring.

A major­ity of boomers also are shaky about their nest eggs.

In all, 53 per­cent of boomers polled said they do not feel con­fi­dent they’ll be able to afford a com­fort­able retire­ment. That’s up from 44 per­cent who were con­cerned about retire­ment finances in March.

“I’m not con­fi­dent at all,” says 63-year-old Susan Webb of West Lib­erty, Iowa.

Webb — one of the 77 mil­lion boomers born between 1946 and 1964 — had long hoped to retire at 65 from her job as a real estate bro­ker. Not any­more, not since the eco­nomic down­turn that led to depressed hous­ing prices, wild stock mar­ket swings and an unem­ploy­ment rate hov­er­ing at or above 9 per­cent for all but two months since May 2009.

Webb and her hus­band, who’s 67, are both still work­ing full time. They hope to ratchet back to part time at some point, but plans for a scenic lake house where they can go fish­ing and spend time with their two grand­chil­dren will likely mean sell­ing their cur­rent home — not part of the orig­i­nal plan.

At 50, Cheri Hubbs of Nor­folk, Va., is on the younger side of the boomer spec­trum. Even so, she knows she’ll work in retirement.

“I just feel like I’m going to work until the day I die,” says Hubbs, an admin­is­tra­tive assistant.

Hubbs had lit­tle saved for retire­ment when she went to see a finan­cial plan­ner a few years ago. Now, she and her hus­band are sock­ing away as much money as they can. She’s also cut back dras­ti­cally on her lit­tle lux­u­ries — trips to the nail salon and Starbucks.

In the poll, 41 per­cent of boomers said they are expect­ing to have to scale back their lifestyle in some way in retire­ment and 31 per­cent believe they will strug­gle financially.

Retire­ment expert Olivia Mitchell says work­ing longer and cut­ting back are two prac­ti­cal ways for boomers to save more.

“It’s a kind of down­scaled con­sumer soci­ety that I see in the next five years at least,” said Mitchell, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania’s Whar­ton School and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Pen­sion Research Coun­cil. “Con­sume less and tighten the belt.”

Down­siz­ing is part of the plan for soft­ware designer Greg Schmidt of Carlisle, Mass.

Schmidt, 53, says there’s no doubt he’ll be work­ing longer, likely into his 70s. With a daugh­ter in high school and twin 12-year-old boys, he’s got col­lege tuitions to worry about as well as an aging father and father-in-law.

He plans one day to move to a smaller home, maybe in the moun­tains of Ver­mont. Almost one-quarter of boomers in the poll — 23 per­cent — said retire­ment will mean they’ll have to move.

For Schmidt, the stock mar­ket is another source of anxiety.

“I am most con­cerned that we’re going to be enter­ing a dif­fer­ent time and equi­ties aren’t quite as val­ued,” he said. “I am afraid I’m a lit­tle heavy into equities.”

The span between the two AP-LifeGoesStrong.com polls coin­cided with a 10 per­cent drop in the Dow Jones indus­trial aver­age, which recov­ered most of those losses by climb­ing this week to above 12,000 before plung­ing again Wednes­day amid con­cerns about Europe’s debt crisis.

In all, 62 per­cent of the boomers polled lost money on at least one of four core parts of retire­ment savings:

• A work­place retire­ment sav­ings plan, 42 percent.
• Per­sonal invest­ments out­side of an IRA/workplace sav­ings, 41 percent.
• An IRA (indi­vid­ual retire­ment account), 32 percent.
• Real estate, 29 percent.

The AP-LifeGoesStrong.com poll was con­ducted Oct. 5–12 by Knowl­edge Net­works of Palo Alto, Calif. It involved online inter­views with 1,095 baby boomers, as well as com­pan­ion inter­views with an addi­tional 315 adults of other age groups. The sur­vey has a mar­gin of sam­pling error of plus or minus 3.6 per­cent­age points for baby boomers and 4.8 per­cent­age points for all adults.

Knowl­edge Net­works used tra­di­tional tele­phone and mail sam­pling meth­ods to ran­domly recruit respon­dents. Peo­ple selected who had no Inter­net access were given it for free.

Posted by AP News on Nov 10 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.