Work longer, play longer - retire fit?

The longer we work, the more comfortable our retirement. That’s the clear finding of a host of studies on financial wellbeing, the latest being a lengthy piece of research by the influential Center for Retirement Research at Boston College in the USA that however puts the cat among the pigeons.

Published in July 2021, the study entitled Are Older Workers Capable of Working Longer? finds that too many Americans simply aren’t healthy enough to work deeper into their sixties or seventies, let alone eighties and nineties. In fact, the health of people eligible for retirement has begun a decline in the last decade or so. Is it high time we ensure that we retire fit?

“Disabilities can push older workers out of the labour force before their intended retirement date,” the study warns. “Until 2010, the trend of rising disability-free life expectancy in the United States suggested increasing capacity for longer working lives, but recent developments may have stalled this progress.”

Put another way, the quality of life of older Americans is suffering because of a fall in their working-life expectancy, defined as “the additional years of work ability an individual can expect at a given age.”

Here are a few numbers to think about. In 2018, on average, 50 year-old men could expect to live an additional 29.8 years and be capable of working for 21.8 of those years. That means they would be gainfully employed until nearly 72 and put their feet up until nearly 80.

Now, let’s look at women. A 50 year-old woman should live on for another 33.6 years with a working-life expectancy of 23.9 years. So she would earn until nearly 74 and take things quietly until 83 years and a bit.

What happens in those twilight, feet-up years? Most Americans are no longer able to work past those ages – 72 for men and 74 for women – because of work-limiting disabilities, but they live in a community for nearly all that time. The last half year of their lives is spent in some kind of “senior care facility”.

There’s a clear socio-economic factor in this. Lower-educated people, and particularly the black community, show up as having the lowest working-life expectancy. These are sad statistics that should be changing for the better.

Worryingly, this is a reversal of a long-running trend. And although the study is confined to the United States, the findings would be broadly reflective of other affluent western nations. “After trending up for decades, improvements in life expectancy have moderated since 2006,” the study concludes. “Improvements in working-life expectancy have slowed even more.”

Reading between the lines, the other conclusion is that older people should stay fit as long as they can. The fitter they are, the healthier and wealthier.