In a recent column I introduced the idea of the retirement cliff, which detailed the jobs that would lose the most workers to retirement in the next decade.
The Australian Bureau of Statistic (ABS) have recently released the latest data regarding retirement.
Using that data, we will look at the big picture findings to see how retirement has changed and how these changes affected Australia as a whole.
On average, the 4.2 million retirees that currently live in Australia retired at age 56.9. When the ABS asked current workers when they plan to retire, respondents expected to stop work at around 65.4 years – showing early retirement is no more.
The commonly perceived retirement age of 65 hasn’t been the norm in the past three decades as people retired in their mid-50s. A person in their late-80s might well have been in retirement since the early 1990s.
Generational research shows that the longer we live, the more time we spend in each stage of the lifecycle. We stretch out adolescence well into our 30s, for example. We are, of course, adults in a biological sense, but only take on adult responsibilities of caring for children or paying a mortgage in our 30s.
In this sense we can view the 20s as a decade of adolescence. As more Australians acquire multiple tertiary degrees, we pushed the start of our working life into the mid- or late-20s. This means we must work until later in life which pushes retirement age........