US. Is Working Longer The Solution To The Retirement Crisis?
It’s an unavoidable fact: in our broken pension system, millions of older Americans lack the means to retire with dignity. Individual workers want a full retirement and are willing to take responsibility for it.
Profligate spending—drinking too many lattes—is not the reason most Americans don’t have decent pensions. It is the do-it-yourself, commercial, voluntary system that has failed Americans planning for retirement Some policy makers (typically fit as a fiddle and happily employed as academics or Senators) have proposed a “free-lunch” policy: Americans can just work longer. The result is all gain with no cost. But there are many reasons working longer won’t work.
On the fourth episode of my podcast Reset Retirement, we explored the question, “How long can we work?” The takeaway is simple: the advice to work longer is not a real solution in the presence of widespread age discrimination, unpredictable life shocks and involuntary retirement—getting laid off or pushed out of a job before one is ready to retire.
Read more @Forbes
