Retirement Trends Over the Past 10 Years

I retired over 15 years ago, but stopped work less than 8 years ago, in that time trends in retirement have changed. The first surprise is that the trend to early retirement has ended and North Americans are starting to push back the time they are starting to retire.

We have better healthcare facilities and healthier diets and lifestyles, than our parents and worldwide life expectancy has increased.

Compared to our European and Scandinavian counterparts, the USA and Canada are behind when it comes to retirement ages, working later in our lives.

Data from Lovemoney shows the average retirement age across the world, with South Africans retiring around age 60, many European and Scandinavian countries retire in their early to mid-’60s, while South Koreans work well past the official retirement, not slowing down until age 73. In North America, we used to retire in our early 60’s know people are pushing this back to their late 60’s, with the average age of retirement in the USA now 67.2.

When the time comes to retire, it’s important that we make it a time filled with the people, places, and activities that we truly cherish. Planning for your dream retirement often starts well before retirement age.

Not only are we retiring later, but those also who are working after retirement is growing. the number of people aged over 70 who are still working in the UK, has doubled to almost 500,000.

A survey in the United Kingdom found that the number of men aged 70 or over and still in full or part-time work has increased by 137%, and the increase for women is 131%.

As the researcher's highlight, there is a growing understanding of the health and social benefits of working later in life. Everyone who wants to work should be able to regardless of their age, and older workers still are making a valuable contribution in workplaces in the UK, the US and Canada.

Many individuals still working in their 60s, 70s and 80s are doing so through choice, not because they must, citing reasons that their age and experience give them an advantage over younger colleagues, and because they feel an enormous sense of job satisfaction. In earlier generations people worked because they had to work.

In previous generations, it wasn’t uncommon to see many individuals begin volunteering once they had retired. For instance, many retirees chose to volunteer at primary schools, helping young children to read.

Research from nfpSynergy shows while those aged 65 and over were the second biggest age group to volunteer, coming behind 16-24 year-olds, they had dropped by 1% over the last five years, while the number of 55-64 year-olds volunteering had decreased by 7%. This trend is upsetting, my age group has historically been a key pillar of the volunteering community and so it is undoubtedly a shame to see them take a forced, and relatively collective, step back from their pivotal societal role, because of Covid-19 and the inability to predict when we’ll emerge into a post-pandemic landscape means it’s especially difficult to forecast when we might see an upsurge in volunteering rates amongst the elderly.

Amongst the youth, there is more room for positivity. With youth volunteering rates generally on the incline over the past decade and with the new Covid-19 climate of mass volunteering, perhaps we might witness the inculcation of a new mindset amongst the younger generations in which volunteering becomes part of the norm.

Of course, these figures could be attributed to the fact that people are choosing to work well into ‘retirement’ age, or could it be because retirees are spending their golden years exploring new hobbies and interests?

Modern retirees expect to be able to travel, and for many, it plays a central role in their plans for a dream retirement.

Research shows that those aged 65 and over have increased their spending on overseas travel by 37% over the past four years, which changed in 2020 because of COVID, but there is a pent-up demand for travel.

Another travel trend revealed is that retirees are more likely to take longer trips than another age group, staying for an average of 6.6 nights, compared to the average of 5.8 nights of other age groups.

The way that people purchase a retirement property is changing drastically. While the act of downsizing from large family properties to smaller, more manageable homes is still relevant and has been for some time, there are various ways to make this happen.

There are a growing number of retirees that are choosing to rent their retirement property. Your retirement should be a time for you to relish in the parts of your life that truly bring you joy and contentment and the trends show that we were doing this until COVID temporarily stopped us.  The idea for this post was
taken from a blog posted in November 2019 by Oscar Russell