Fourteen percent of Americans under the age of 50 and 29% over 50 said that they feel very or extremely financially prepared for retirement, according to the poll, while 40% over 50 said they feel somewhat prepared. Only one-third of those over 50 said they feel unprepared.
Among those who have already retired, 38% said they felt very or extremely prepared when they retired, while one-quarter said they didn’t feel prepared. While 45% of participants said that Americans working past the regular retirement age of 66 is beneficial for the US economy, 39% said that people working past 66 years old is good for workers, while 29% viewed it as a negative thing.
Thirty percent, on the other hand, said that Americans staying in the workforce longer is neither a good nor bad thing. Forty-two percent of Americans above 50 years of age who are still in the workforce said people continuing to work past the retirement age is a positive thing, compared to 15% who claimed the opposite.
"The average retirement age that we see in the data has gone up a little bit, but it hasn't gone up that much," Anqi Chen, assistant director of savings research at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, told multiple media outlets. "So people have to live in retirement much longer, and they may not have enough assets to support themselves in retirement."
Some surveyed Americans indicated they wanted to prolong their stay in the workforce as a result of needing to keep up with the day-to-day costs of living. "One of the things about thinking about never retiring is that you didn't save a whole lot of money," Ronni Bennett, 78, told media outlets.
The pollsurveyed 1,423 adults between February 14 and 18 and has a sampling error margin of 3.7 percentage points.