Poll: 1 in 4 don’t plan to retire

CHICAGO — Nearly onequarter of Americans say they never plan to retire, according to a poll that suggests a disconnection between individuals’ retirement plans and the realities of aging in the workforce.

Experts say illness, injury, layoffs and caregiving responsibilities often force older workers to leave their jobs sooner than they’d like.

According to the poll from the Associated PressNORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 23 percent of workers, including nearly 2 in 10 of those over 50, don’t expect to stop working. Roughly another quarter of Americans say they will continue working beyond their 65th birthday.

According to government data, about 1 in 5 people 65 and older were working or actively looking for a job in June.

For many, money has a lot to do with the decision to keep working.

“The average retirement age that we see in the data has gone up a little bit, but it hasn’t gone up that much,” said Anqi Chen, assistant director of savings research at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “So people have to live in retirement much longer, and they may not have enough assets to support themselves in retirement.”

Among those who are fully retired, 38 percent said they felt very or extremely prepared when they retired, while 25 percent said they felt not very or not at all prepared.

“One of the things about thinking about never retiring is that you didn’t save a whole lot of money,” says Ronni Bennett, 78, who was pushed out of her job as a New York City-based website editor at 63.

She searched for work in the immediate aftermath of her layoff, a process she described as akin to “banging my head against a wall.” Finding Manhattan too expensive without a steady stream of income, she eventually moved to Portland, Maine. A few years later, she moved again, to Lake Oswego, Ore.

“Sometimes I fantasize that if I win the lottery, I’d go back to New York,” said Bennett, who has a blog called Time Goes By that chronicles her experiences aging, relocating and, for the past two years, living with a pancreatic cancer diagnosis.

Just 6 percent of fully retired poll respondents said they left the labor market before turning 50.

But remaining in the workforce may be unrealistic for people dealing with unexpected illness or injuries. For them, high medical bills and a lack of savings loom large over day-to-day expenditures.

“People like me, who are average, everyday working people, can have something catastrophic happen, and we lose everything because of medical bills,” said Larry Zarzecki, a former Maryland police officer who stopped working in his 40s after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.