Changing View of Retirement

By Jennifer Saranow Schultz

Is the traditional concept of retirement likely to become a casualty of the latest recession?

The people at Sun Life Financial, a financial services company, seem to think so. The traditional view of retirement, stopping work when government benefits become available, is changing. More and more, Americans are choosing to be ‘unretired,’ that is, continue to work full- or part-time after the age when they are eligible to receive full Social Security benefits.”

To learn more about whether, and why, people may be choosing to continue to work after reaching the traditional retirement age, Sun Life began conducting a survey two years ago that it calls the Unretirement Index. According to Sun Life, “unretirement” is defined as “working at least 20 hours per week after the age when one is eligible to receive Social Security benefits.”

Sun Life recently released its latest Unretirement Index, which captures this retirement lifestyle change and hints that people may not be so happy about it.

The survey found that more than half of working respondents — 52 percent — expect to work at least three years longer than originally planned and just as many respondents expect to retire at age 70 as age 65. These delays, according to Sun Life, “are driven by economic conditions, a lack of confidence in government benefits in the future and dwindling retirement savings.”

http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/changing-view-of-retirement-as-we-know-it/?ref=your-money