Over one-third (34%) of people aged 45-54 have no plan in place for their remaining working years
Planning for your retirement can never start too early, especially after the UK workforce experienced an unprecedented period of uncertainty during 18-months of lockdown which saw 11.7 million employees out on furlough leave, at a cost of £70 billion.
However, now that the economy and most industry sectors are finding their financial feet again at the start of 2022, a recent survey of 1,000 people carried out by Opinium on behalf of Hargreaves Lansdown found that over one-third (34%) of people aged 45-54 have no plan in place for their remaining working years.
This compares to roughly a quarter of 35-to-44-year-olds and 25-34-year-olds who had no plan for the time between age 50 and retirement.
Some 42 per cent of those in the 45-54 age group said they planned to continue in their current job and work full-time. A further 10 per cent said they would stay in the same role but move to part-time hours – only five per cent said they planned to stop work completely.
Helen Morrissey, senior pensions and retirement analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown said: These findings point to a worrying lack of planning among those closest to retirement on how they plan to spend their remaining working years. The pandemic may well have played a part in this with the economic upheaval potentially causing chaos for people’s retirement planning with many older workers retiring early after being made redundant.
She continued: There’s also the chance that the investment market volatility we saw earlier in the pandemic has had an impact on people’s pensions causing them to put off their plans for retirement a while longer.
She said: Easing into retirement by working part time is often a better way of managing such a huge change from a financial and emotional wellbeing perspective.