At the same time, retirement dropped financial anxiety among Americans: While 38 percent of the pre-retiree respondents reported feeling anxious about their financial situation, just 23 percent of recent retirees said the same.
The current crop of pre-retirees expects to work in retirement – pre-retirees were four times more likely to say that they’ll work during retirement than recent retirees.
When planning for retirement, most pre-retirees are focusing their efforts on timing when to claim of government pensions, establishing a retirement date, or generating retirement income. Fewer respondents were creating formal plans for retirement income or considering holistic financial planning.
When interacting with retirement programs and financial institutions, individuals are moving from traditional financial advisors and in-person advice to more digital solutions. Even recent U.S. retirees, a cohort mostly above age 60, were more likely to seek financial advice online than in-person.
Vanguard recommended a number of initiatives that could help close the “advice” gap – scalable advice made possible by technology, expanding the reach and capabilities of traditional advisors into a broader range of topics and services, and adding features like retirement income projections or retirement income defaults to workplace plans and platforms to make it easier for individuals to plan.
For the survey, 5,663 households headed by 55 to 75 year olds in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia were surveyed in October and November of 2015. U.S. respondents had minimum assets of $50,000.