Work In Retirement: The New Norm

By Brent Meyer — SafeMoney.com Founder & Editor Reviewed by Licensed Financial Professionals  |  SafeMoney.com — Trusted Since 2011  |  Updated Regularly Quick Answer: Explore the trend of working in retirement and discover safe money alternatives for your financial future. Learn more at SafeMoney.com. What do you plan to do the first day you actually retire? Plan that dream trip? Write that first page of your novel? Explore new opportunities to partake in hobbies or other interests? Just take a deep breath and learn to relax? If you are like most of the retirees surveyed in the 2018 Retirement Preparedness Study , your retirement years may look a lot like your working years. Or, at least, that is what working-age Americans foresee for their retirement futures. Commissioned by PGIM Investments and conducted by The Harris Poll, the study found that 52% of pre-retiree baby boomers expect to have a full-time or part-time job during retirement. This finding is in sharp contrast to the lifestyle of current retirees, with only 6% of them working for a paycheck. Pre-retiree Gen Xers are even more convinced they will need to work in retirement , according to the study, as a substantial 58% responded this way. Working in Retirement: The Story that Never Ends? What is driving this expectation that work won’t end when retirement begins? To get an idea, Harris Poll interviewed generations of working adults, including retired and not-quite-retired-yet baby boomers as well as working Gen Xers. In particular, one set of findings stands out: When those surveyed offered reports of when they retired or when they expected to. Here’s a breakdown of retirement timelines and expectations by generation. When asked about the timing of when they retired, baby boomers said: What about Gen Xers? Here is what they said when asked when they expected to retire: What is interesting is that eligibility for Social Security is a common milestone for retired and working Americans alike. For many, a drive to work longer stems from the belief that Social Security may not be solvent by the time they reach retirement age — or even when already retired. In recent headlines, it was reported that in 2018, Social Security will have to dip into its trust fund to pay its benefits for the first time since 1982. That might have helped fuel some of the concerns that retirees and working adults expressed in the PGIM Investments survey. Even so, a large number