retirement age – Page 3 – Actuarial News

Excerpt:

Millions of people born in the 1970s may have to wait longer to collect their UK state pensions if a government review, which was announced this week, recommends bringing forward plans for a retirement age of 68.
The state pension age rose to 66 last year, with two further rises planned, meaning that by 2046 those born on or after April 1977 would need to wait until 68 before they can draw the benefit.
However, the review will look at bringing forward that change by eight years, so that the increase is phased in between 2037 and 2039.

Author(s): Hilary Osborne

Publication Date: 15 Dec 2021

Publication Site: The Guardian

Swiss man changes gender to retire and receive his pension a year earlier

February 8, 2022February 8, 2022 Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://rmx.news/switzerland/swiss-man-changes-gender-to-retire-and-receive-his-pension-a-year-earlier/

Excerpt:

A man in Switzerland has exploited an administrative loophole and formally changed his gender in order to retire a year earlier, it has emerged.
New rules introduced on Jan. 1 enable any Swiss resident with the “intimate conviction” that they do not belong to the sex they are registered as in the civil status register can apply to change their gender, in addition to their first name, for just 75 Swiss francs (€72).
And it took just four days for the system to be taken advantage of with Swiss daily Luzerner Zeitung reporting that a man from Lucerne applied to change his gender so that he could receive his state pension at the Swiss retirement age for women of 64, a year earlier than men.
While there are regulations supposedly in place to prevent individuals from making “manifestly abusive” applications, there is in reality “no obligation” on the part of civil servants to “verify the intimate conviction of the persons concerned” and the sincerity of the applicant is presumed in accordance with the principle of good faith.

Author(s): John Cody

Publication Date: 30 Jan 2022

Publication Site: Remix News

Statutory retirement age still needed, says Manpower Minister as Bill passed for higher retirement and re-employment ages

January 30, 2022January 30, 2022 Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/retirement-reemployment-ages-older-workers-manpower-minister-tan-see-leng-2285771

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Excerpt:

A statutory retirement age is still important as a safeguard against those employers who dismiss older employees due to their age, said Manpower Minister Tan See Leng on Tuesday (Nov 2), as Parliament voted to pass an amendment to the Retirement and Re-employment Age Act.
The Bill passed on Tuesday amends the Retirement and Re-employment Act so that the Minister for Manpower can prescribe a retirement age and re-employment age of up to 65 and 70 respectively.
This is in line with recommendations by the Tripartite Workgroup on Older Workers in 2019 that both the retirement age and re-employment age be raised by three years to 65 and 70 respectively by 2030.

Author(s): Chew Hui Min

Publication Date: 2 Nov 2021

Publication Site: Channel News Asia

Here is the age when many Americans hope to retire

January 25, 2022January 25, 2022 Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/03/here-is-the-age-when-many-americans-hope-to-retire.html

Excerpt:

The youngest cohort, Generation Y — ages 25 to 40 — plans to retire at an average age of 59. For Generation X — now 41 to 56 — the average age is 60. Baby boomers — who range from 57 to 75 — indicated they plan to work longer, with an average expected retirement age of 68.
That’s as 83% of non-retired U.S. investors said they are confident they will be financially secure in retirement. That includes 88% of Gen Y, 82% of Gen X and 79% of baby boomers.

Author(s): Lorie Konish

Publication Date: 3 Jan 2022

Publication Site: CNBC

Millions of workers retired during the pandemic. The economy needs them to “unretire,” experts say.

December 9, 2021December 9, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/retirement-covid-pandemic-unretire-labor-shortage/

Excerpt:

An economist will tell you it’s a hot labor market: A record number of people quit their jobs in September, and the U.S. is seeing record job openings as the economy chugs back to life from the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic drove millions of workers into early retirement — and experts say they could be key to reviving the economy.
The number of people who retired rose much faster than the typical pace during the pandemic. More than 3 million additional people retired compared with normal, a Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis analysis found. Meanwhile, the economy is still down nearly 4 million jobs from before COVID-19.
“40% of the older workers that were pushed out of the labor market because they were unemployed, they were laid off, they were fired during the pandemic, 40% of them were permanent job losers and most of them said OK, I’m not just a discouraged worker, I’m not a long-term unemployed, I’m going to tell the [Labor Department] survey I’m retired,'” said Teresa Ghilarducci, labor economist and professor at The New School.
….
But even if retirees return to work at the average pre-pandemic pace, it will take more than two years to bounce back from the recent surge in retirements, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas found.
Last month, employment among workers 55 and older increased while unemployment dropped slightly. Older workers are typically more likely to face long-term unemployment than younger workers. While long-term unemployment among older workers changed little last month, it has declined in recent months. Older Americans coming out of retirement might not be returning to the same landscape.

Author(s): Sarah Ewall-Wice

Publication Date: 8 Dec 2021

Publication Site: CBS News

Spain inches ahead with pension reform

September 20, 2021September 20, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.thelocal.com/20210718/spain-inches-ahead-with-pension-reform/

Excerpt:

Spain will pay workers to postpone retirement as part of a pensions reform strategy that analysts warn does not go far enough to cut a huge deficit in the system.
With nearly 30 billion euros ($36 billion) of annual losses in 2020 and rising, Spain’s social security budget is one of the biggest contributors to the country’s ballooning public deficit.
The European Commission has long demanded that Spain reform its pension system and has made it a condition for accessing European Union economic recovery funds.
Under a planned reform unveiled earlier this month that aims to get more people to work longer, Spain will give cheques worth up to 12,000 euros ($14,000) per year to retirement-age workers who postpone their retirement.
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The 2013 reform also gradually increased the legal retirement age to reach 67 in 2027 from around 65 years currently.
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Jordi Fabregat of the Esade business school said part of the problem is that Spain offers generous public pensions, with monthly payments amounting to 80 percent of a worker’s final salary compared with an average of 55 percent for all of Europe.

Publication Date: 18 July 2021

Publication Site: The Local

Vote to increase Swiss retirement age clears signature hurdle

September 20, 2021September 20, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Vote to increase Swiss retirement age clears signature hurdle

Excerpt:

The youth chapter of the PLR (FDP) has successfully collected enough signatures for an initiative to raise the official retirement age in Switzerland to 66 years old, reported RTS.
On 16 July 2021, initiative organisers submitted 145,000 voter signatures as part of the formal process of launching a referendum in Switzerland. Under referendum rules a minimum of 100,000 valid signatures must be collected within 18 months.
The official retirement age in Switzerland is currently 65 for men and 64 for women, although the government recently passed laws to create a universal retirement age of 65 for both men and women. The federal government also agreed to increase VAT up to 8% to help improve pension system finances.
The perilous state of Switzerland’s state pension system is well known. People are living longer and the nation’s population is ageing, leaving fewer working-age tax payers to fund the pensions of a rising number of retirees. Without reform a funding shortfall of CHF 200 billion is forecast over the next 25 years.

Publication Date: 23 July 2021

Publication Site: Le News

Unions contest pension reform plans with Bern demonstration

September 20, 2021September 20, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/unions-contest-pension-reform-plans-with-bern-demonstration/46959184

Excerpt:

Thousands marched in Bern on Saturday against a proposed reforms of the Swiss old-age pension scheme, notably the plan to raise the retirement age for women from 64 to 65.
The demonstration, which was authorised by Bern authorities, was attended by some 15,000 people, according to the trade unions who organised it; the police have not (yet) released estimates.
The protest took place under the slogan “hands off our pensions”, and was clearly aimed at parliamentarians currently discussing an overhaul of the country’s three-pillar system.
A press release by the Trade Union Federation said that the current pension system is “no longer enough to live on” and that politicians should be raising payments rather than trying to cut them; as for making women work a year longer, this is a non-runner, it says, given the years of part-time and unpaid work they do during their active lives.

Publication Date: 18 Sept 2021

Publication Site: Swiss Info

Populists May Kill Chile’s Pension Success

June 3, 2021June 3, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/populists-may-kill-chiles-pension-success-11622670275

Excerpt:

Populist politicians are destroying Chile’s revolutionary pension system. In 1981 Chile became the first country to privatize social security, ending the pay-as-you-go system that had been in place since 1924 and had collapsed. Now Chile’s left wants to resurrect it.
The state-run pension system was plagued by corruption and rent-seeking since its earliest days. Among the 11,395 laws passed by the Chilean Congress between 1926 and 1963, 10,532 granted pension privileges to special-interest groups, many of them politically connected. In 1968, Chilean President Eduardo Frei, a center-left Christian Democrat, described the cronyism that plagued social security as an “absurd monstrosity” that the government couldn’t afford.
Pension privatization reversed this perverse dynamic. Instead of taxing active workers to pay pensioners through the bureaucracy, the new system, created by former Labor Minister Jose Pinera, established that 10% of the employee’s salary is transferred automatically to an account under his name at one of the Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones, or AFP. These private pension funds compete to attract workers and invest their pensions for a fee.
This has restored the link between contributions and pension benefits by making workers responsible for saving the funds that will support them once they retire. This novel system also limited corruption and rent-seeking, and Chilean taxpayers are no longer on the hook for pension deficits, which in 1981 represented 3% of gross domestic product.
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Longer life expectancy is also a problem. When the AFP system was created, men retired at 65 with an average life expectancy around 67. Women retired at the age of 60 with a life expectancy around 74. Today, the retirement ages are unchanged but life expectancy has increased to 77 for men and 83 for women. This means more years of retirement have to be funded by the same years of saving.

Author(s): Axel Kaiser

Publication Date: 2 June 2021

Publication Site: WSJ

DO MEN WHO WORK LONGER LIVE LONGER? EVIDENCE FROM THE NETHERLANDS

May 22, 2021May 22, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IB-21-8.pdf

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Excerpt:

As expected, the raw data show that Dutch men who worked at ages 62-65 were less likely to die over the subsequent five years than men who were not working (see Figure 1). Importantly, Figure 1 shows that mortality decreased at nearly identical rates for working and non-working men between 1999 and 2008, before the policy became available. The fact that these trends are parallel provides more confidence in the policy experiment, indicating that whatever was happening to working men prior to the DWB was also happening to non-working men. In contrast, the mortality rate in 2009-2011 continued to improve somewhat for working men, who were benefiting from the DWB, while the mortality rate for non-working men plateaued.

Author(s): Alice Zulkarnain, Matthew S. Rutledge

Publication Date: May 2021

Publication Site: Center for Retirement Research at Boston College