Retired Americans are feeling pretty good about their finances, according to survey data out Thursday from the analytics firm Gallup. Seventy-four percent said they have enough money to live comfortably.
That comes as a pleasant surprise. Gallup has been asking working people about their retirement outlook and retirees about their actual financial security for nearly 25 years, and there’s a persistent gap between expectations and reality.
When you’re still planning for a distant retirement, you’re probably thinking about whether you’ll be able to sustain your current lifestyle. But by the time people actually leave the workforce?
“They kind of just don’t sweat some of the stuff that maybe younger people do,” said Anqi Chen, a senior economist at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research.
For older folks, she said driving a new-model car or going on vacation is just a lower priority. “What they maybe care more about is their social circle and whether they can see their grandkids,” she said.
That shift accounts for some of the persistent gap between workers’ gloomy expectations and retirees’ rosy reports in the annual survey. But that gap has widened in recent years.
And Jeffery Jones, senior editor with Gallup, said retirees’ responses aren’t budging.
“It’s more the nonretirees which are more sensitive to how the economy is doing,” he said.
And, the data shows, maybe more pessimistic because of headlines about a looming Social Security crisis.
“People’s anxiety about Social Security is understandable,” said economist Teresa Ghilarducci with the New School for Social Research. But, she said, it’s also probably overblown.
Worst-case scenario — and an unlikely one — she said, benefits are cut by up to 20% after 2035. Meanwhile, Gallup’s polling finds only about half of workers expect to get anything out of the program.
“If you underestimate Social Security, you tend to compensate by overestimating other sources of income,” she said. And sometimes you make risky investments.
But Jeffrey Jones with Gallup said that pessimism might encourage some of us to squirrel away more in our retirement accounts, which is part of how we wind up comfier than expected.
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