Reluctant retirees are on the rise with new research finding one in ten UK adults plan to never retire. What does this mean for your retirement planning?
We know that the concept of retirement is changing.
What was once considered the traditional retirement – retire at 60 or 65, switch from working to a life of leisure, stay retired – has been replaced for many with something entirely different.
Partial retirement, the start of a new career or deferring retirement entirely until much later in life are now all perfectly acceptable choices.
Further evidence of this change to the traditional model of retirement comes from new research which has found one in ten UK adults plan to never retire.
A further one in eight expect to continue working until the ages of 71 to 80.
The research comes from Co-op Funeralcare and Co-op Legal Services who found in their joint study that those aged 65 and over are most reluctant to give up work.
This is in stark contrast to those aged 18-24, with just 8% believing they will never retire.
Could it be our attitudes towards retirement change as we get older and closer to the realisation that retirement is either unaffordable or undesirable?
[tweet_box]One in ten UK adults plan to never retire[/tweet_box]The study also found regional variations when it comes to the likelihood of an early retirement.
Older workers in the East are likely to remain in work longest, clocking aged 66. Whilst the 50 plus generation hope to retire aged 64 on average, Londoners are the most likely to want to keep working, with 14% having no intention to retire.
This is in contrast, the Welsh, who are least likely to have no plans to ever retire and expect to finish work five years earlier than those in the East.
Amongst those retiring later than hoped, for many this is a lifestyle choice.
A fifth of those surveyed chose to work for longer because they liked their job, whilst 18% remained employed but cut down their hours.
A further one in eight said their employer was reluctant to lose them, whilst one in thirteen said they didn’t want to slow down and a tenth wanted to save for retirement travel plans.
Women are most likely to put off retirement with one in ten never intending to stop working in comparison to just one in fifteen men.
It was little surprise to see that financial concerns are a key reason for delaying retirement.
22% of over 50s kept working in later life because they had insufficient funds to generate the income they needed in retirement.
Here at Informed Choice, our approach to retirement planning is to never treat retirement as the default option.
Retirement planning remains important as an effective insurance against the inability to work in later life; this could be the result of poor health, the need to care for a spouse or elderly relative, or due to the lack of appropriate work.
By having a robust retirement plan in place, even reluctant retirees can fall back on their Plan B should deferring retirement no longer presents a realistic option.
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