According to a recent survey done by Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, employers may not be all that interested in keeping someone on after the official retirement age. Working past 65 has long been the advice of experts to those who haven’t built up a large enough nest egg to retire at the traditional age of 65 and it’s long been accepted as one of the best ideas for dealing with that particular problem, but it sounds like no one ever asked the employers!
The center conducted two surveys, the first discovered that employers liked older employees just as much as they liked younger employees – not terribly surprising if you consider the employment laws in the US. No one wants to claim they like younger employees better, that’s called age discrimination.
The second survey took a look at the expectations of employers out of their older employees in terms of retirement. Half of the 400 nationally representative companies believed that their 50+ employee population won’t have the nest egg to retire at 65 and that half will likely want to work a few extra years (quantitatively at least 2 years longer), so it’s clear that at half of employers are aware of this but in general employers are “lukewarm” to the idea of working longer.
What this means for most is that if you are slacking on retirement savings because you plan on working towards 69, remember that it’s not a guarantee.