New data show most Americans don’t expect to work into their mid-60s

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Among young workers who see getting on the hamster wheel of buying a home, saving some money, building some wealth, and retiring as an increasingly distant goal, one meme endures: I will never be able to stop working.

But new data from the New York Fed published this week showed the number of workers expecting to work beyond age 62 has plummeted.

Our Chart of the Week below shows the number of respondents to the New York Fed’s survey who expect to work beyond 62 fell to 45.8% in March, down from 55.4% four years ago. And just 31.2% of workers expect to work beyond 67 years old, down from 36.2% four years ago.

New York Fed economists found these expectations were represented broadly across age, education, and income demographics, though they were especially pronounced among women.

The New York Fed doesn’t know why this change has happened. But the bank’s economists cite potential preferences to part-time or freelance employment, wealth, future earnings, and economic confidence, or — on the other side of the optimism ledger — a lack of confidence about making it to an expected age as factors influencing these results.

That the reasons can be both “YOLO” and its forward-thinking direct opposite only adds to the broader adoption of these expectations. But it also highlights the future’s complete opacity, especially in the face of a potential paradigm shift in work brought on by AI and automation across sectors. Innovations that could give us a 10-hour work week, or make us hungry.

Almost every chart mapping the labor market’s trajectory over the past five years is clearly shaped by the pandemic.

We saw a surge of joblessness and healing as businesses shut down and reopened. Then came “The Great Resignation,” when more people than usual decided to quit their jobs amid a post-pandemic hiring frenzy.

Both sides of this supply and demand reversal linger as contributors to the inflation conversation that defines this economic moment. And this precipitous shift in people’s retirement expectations could also reshape economic trends and recast known challenges into big problems.

“To the extent that these expectations signal actual future retirement behavior, they also have implications for future decisions by consumers about the timing of claims for social security benefits and the receipt of those benefits,” the New York Fed wrote.

A measured way to say that millions of people leaving the workforce earlier than expected will have a cost. And the bill may be due sooner than we think.

— Ethan Wolff-Mann, Senior Editor at Yahoo Finance