COVID-19 Appears to Have Little Impact on Retirement Preparation

Now the COVID-19 pandemic and its ongoing financial and health fallout have exacerbated a challenging retirement picture for many Americans, leading to two questions: Has the pandemic changed the savings behavior of retirement plan participants? And are workers delaying retirement because of the pandemic? Americans closest to retirement have been affected by the pandemic’s economic consequences di. [...] 2 The key questions from the survey that are the focus of this brief: Have you changed your retirement plans because of COVID-19 and the resulting pandemic and its impact on the economy? I plan to retire later than planned. [...] Previous research has found that declines in the stock market lead more-educated workers, who are more likely than less-educated workers to own stocks, to delay retirement.4 And fears about market decline or volatility in the early months of the pandemic could have led some workers to say they planned to delay, particularly among the workers who were nearest to retirement age. [...] The impact of market fluctuations Although the investment markets have recovered their losses from the early days of the pandemic, the remaining economic fallout is unclear, and continued market volatility is likely.11 Workers ages 55 to 62 have more time than their older counterparts to weather market fluctuations, provided they are not forced to retire, while those closer to retirement have less. [...] Future research should examine the long-term experience of older workers over the course of the entire pandemic and investigate whether these trends continued to hold, whether more older workers and recent retirees began to tap their savings, and whether older workers who were laid off were able to return to work.