Retirement, Slipping Farther and Farther Away

Over the last decade and a half, Americans’ expected retirement age has slowly risen to 67 from 60, according to a new Gallup survey.

If a standard retirement age of 60 sounds relatively low, remember that the economy was booming in the 1990s and Americans’ savings were being inflated by the tech bubble. That’s about the time when housing prices began to skyrocket, which also made homeowners feel particularly wealthy. Since then, of course, both the dot-com and housing bubbles have burst.

Americans have been putting their money where their mouths are, so to speak, and have been working longer and longer in recent decades. In 1996, for example, 45.8 percent of workers ages 60 to 64 were either working or looking for work. Last year, the figure was 54.5 percent.

Labor force participation rates have risen for other segments of older Americans, too:

While more people in their 60s and 70s want to work, the share of those older workers who have found jobs has fallen. Last year, 6.8 percent of workers 60 to 64 were unemployed. That compares with less than 3 percent in the late 1990s.

Perhaps 6.8 percent still sounds low, but consider that once unemployed, older Americans are very unlikely to find a job. The older a worker is, the more difficulty he or she has getting hired.

These trends have worrisome implications not just for older workers and their families, but for government budgets, too.

Struggling with deflated savings and few new job opportunities, older Americans are becoming increasingly dependent on Social Security and other public services.

In the same poll cited above, Gallup found that 33 percent of American nonretirees expect Social Security to be a “major source of income” for them in their old age. That’s an uptick from 27 percent a decade ago.