Many Retirees Wish They'd Planned, Saved Earlier: EBRI Survey

Unexpected medical expenses, preventive health spending, inadequate retirement savings and inflation led the list of retirees’ pre-retirement financial concerns — in that order — while inflation led the list in retirement, with more than half citing it as keeping them awake at night.

Health-related expenses, the possibility of running out of money and market volatility also ranked high among retirees’ current worries,  EBRI reported.

Among other findings, those who worked with a financial advisor as they made the transition to retirement “reported that the primary benefits were asset-allocation related, including assistance in identifying their risk tolerance and help understanding how to turn their retirement savings into an income stream.”

Many retirees said that while working in their primary career, they didn’t understand how taxes would affect their financial situation in retirement;  almost 40% said they were paying different taxes than they’d anticipated.

Only 25% said their former employers had offered a financial planning benefit.

The survey respondents were overwhelmingly white, and most reported they had attained at least a college degree. Sixty-three percent had an investment portfolio.

 While 82% reported their status as “retired, not working,” some identified themselves as retired and working part-time or retired from a primary career but with a non-retirement working status. (Other statuses cited included disabled and unable to work, unemployed and homemaker.)

The roughly one in five retirees who did not identify themselves as simply “‘retired, not working’ indicates that work, conceptually, is often tied into the retirement identity,” EBRI said, noting that as its previous research has shown, “among the retirees working in this later stage of life, the most frequently cited reason for continuing to work into retirement was ‘work is rewarding.’”