Half of U.S. Full-Time Employees Plan to Defer Retirement Due to Financial Reasons

MetLife recently released their 2019 U.S. Employee Benefits study. It's the 17th year they've done this study.

The study is based on a survey of 2,675 adult Americans with a full-time job at companies with at least two employees.

About 40% the respondents work for smaller businesses (those with less than 500 employees) and 60% work for larger firms, including 20% who work for firms with more than 10,000 employees.

There's a lot of good information in the study. But the study chart below (click to enlarge) really jumped out at us.

It shows that 52% of the full-time employees surveyed said they plan to postpone their retirement due to their financial situation. This is up from just 37% in 2015.

We've long often covered the trend towards delayed retirement (see our baby boomer section for many articles on this topic). But even we were surprised by these numbers.

The reason is the people who took this survey all have full-time traditional jobs. These are the people who should be the best prepared to retire. 

And yet about half believe they're going to need to delay their retirement because they don't have the financial resources not to. 

As we've pointed out in the past, for a variety of reasons Americans 55 and older have the highest rate of self-employment of any demographic cohort. 

This means deferred retirement also means a lot more older independent workers. This is especially true since the millions of Americans who don't have traditional full-time jobs are likely to be in even worse retirement shape than those that do.

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