By Alicia H. Munnell

At the end of a recent conference, the perennial question arose — once again — as to whether the United States faces a retirement crisis.

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I’ve never been wedded to the word “crisis,” but the Center’s National Retirement Risk Index (NRRI) suggests that about half of today’s working-age households are at risk of not being able to maintain their standard of living in retirement. While the NRRI depends on a number of specific assumptions, anything close to 50% at risk does seem like a serious problem to me.

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The conference participant bolstering the no-crisis view cited a survey prepared by the Society of Actuaries. That’s a good and respectable group, so never having given their survey the careful look it deserves, I took some time to read through the 143-page document. My starting position was if the SOA documented “no problem,” I would concede and start planning a lovely post-pandemic six months in Paris.

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The 2019 online survey of about 1,061 preretirees and 1,255 retirees born between 1938 and 1973 was conducted by Greenwald & Associates in June 2019. This study was the 10th in a series documenting the retirement concerns and preparedness of older Americans. The authors acknowledge that the sample is not random, but rather consists of people willing to a take a 20-minute internet survey. They do reweight the results to match the age, sex, education, and household targets in the March 2019 Current Population Survey.

The results for 2019 had improved substantially over the previous survey in 2017 for both retirees and preretirees. In fact, the majority of the retirees surveyed are financially as well off or better than they expected before retirement. The authors note that this finding is hard to square with the fact that the retirees retired much earlier than the preretirees expected to retire, and substantially more people expect to work in retirement than actually do.

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