Are American Retirees Enjoying Their Lives?

Retirement has long been pitched as the long exhale after a lifetime of work, the moment when the alarm clock stops ringing and instead of deadlines the calendar is finally filled with things from a bucket list. But if you ask many retirees, in reality that practice is quite convoluted, although it's not necessarily worse.   

As per a survey by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, retirement is actually improving life for many Americans. About 44% of retirees say their enjoyment of life has improved since leaving the workforce, while 41% report higher levels of happiness. In fact, nearly 89% describe themselves as generally happy, and upbeat figures are very good for a stage of life often framed around decline. 

However, on closer look, the disconnect between what retirees imagined and what they actually do begins to show. Retirement does harken back to lost time and 59% are using it for family and friends time, slightly more than the 56% who merely dreamed of it. But elsewhere, reality is falling short, while 65% hoped for a life of travel, only 44% are actually doing it. Hobbies, at least, are holding steady, with 39% both aspiring to and actively pursuing them.  

Behind the relaxed mornings and long lunches sits a quieter financial reality. Leaving the workforce hasn’t always entailed a comfortable life; for 33% of retirees it has led to a decline in their health, and 28% say their financial situation has gone down the drain. Even so, 66% of most households seem to be holding up well with their standard of living remaining the same. 

Financial security remains a pertinent concern, and that’s apparent when the median retiree household earns roughly $63,000 a year, and about $60,087 annually roughly $4,622 a month is spent on living costs. and for more than half of retirees, social security does the heavy lifting as their primary income source. 

But retirement itself is quietly changing and retracting away from its traditional model which deigns that people should walk away from work at an old age, a benchmark set by the Social Security Act in 1935. But that old script of working until 65, collecting a pension, is no longer the default. Employment among Americans 65 and older has risen 117% over the past two decades, because retirees are now working part-time, or pursuing passion projects. In essence retirement has turned into something closer to a gradual transition than a complete full stop.