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.
Despite a two-year pandemic, workers overall are more confident in their financial situation than they’ve been since 2014, according to findings in the eighth annual Stress, Finances, and Well-Being report released today by John Hancock Retirement. That said, overall stress still affects 72% of retirement plan participants surveyed, especially women (79%) and those 36 to 50 years old (77%).
Further, 71% responded said they had experienced stress, depression or loneliness during the past year.
Nationally, the U.S. population only grew by 0.1 percent between July 2020 and July 2021, the lowest rate since the nation’s founding. Pandemic-induced excess deaths, virtually nonexistent international in-migration, and an already-declining birth rate yielded an almost flat population trend nationwide. This, however, belies state-level and regional differences. Whereas the District of Columbia’s population shrunk by 2.8 percent between April 2020 (roughly the start of the pandemic) to July 2021, New York lost 1.8 percent of its population, and Illinois, Hawaii, and California rounded out the top five jurisdictions for population loss, Idaho was gaining 3.4 percent, while Utah, Montana, Arizona, South Carolina, Delaware, Texas, Nevada, Florida, and North Carolina all saw population gains of 1 percent or more.
The picture painted by this population shift is a clear one of people leaving high-tax, high-cost states for lower-tax, lower-cost alternatives. The individual income tax is only one component of overall tax burdens, but it is often highly salient, and is illustrative here. If we include the District of Columbia, then in the top one-third of states for population growth since the start of the pandemic (April 2020 to July 2021 data), the average combined top marginal state and local income tax rate is 3.5 percent, while in the bottom third of states, it is about 7.3 percent.
The one-child policy defined China’s demographic transition for over three decades.
But to combat an aging population and declining birthrates, the government scrapped the policy for a new two-child policy in 2016. Despite this massive change, China still faces a growing demographic crisis.
The above animated population pyramid from James Eagle looks at the distribution of China’s population by age group since 1950, with projections up to the year 2100.
When communist Vietnam recently introduced private retirement funds, it was taking a step not only closer to capitalism, but also toward changing a young pension system that some worry may buckle if citizens get old before getting rich.
Last year marked the first time workers could put part of their paychecks into private retirement accounts, on top of the share contributed to the state pension. But analysts say bigger, systemic change is needed to enable retirement for all, even as the International Labor Organization says the state fund is robust.
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Retirees would seem to be the envy of the neighborhood, receiving payouts worth 75% of their prior wages — the fifth-highest among 70 countries in the Allianz Global Pension Report 2020.
But Vietnam’s system covers just 40% of the elderly, which explains why women keep working longer there than in all but five other countries, the report shows.
The numbers below each cause are the total number of finalized deaths in CDC Wonder as of 11 January 2022 for the completed calendar year 2020.
COVID deaths for under age 15 weren’t in the top 10 causes for those age groups, which is why they aren’t seen in the table. But you may be interested in those numbers: at #12 for ages 5-14, with 49 deaths at #12 for ages 1-4, with 19 deaths at #13 for infant mortality (<1 year), at 35 deaths
In general, other than the new cause of COVID, most of the causes of death were in the same rank order as in 2019, with a few switches for causes that tend to be close in numbers.
The population of the United States grew in the past year by 392,665, or 0.1%, the lowest rate since the nation’s founding.
The slow rate of growth can be attributed to decreased net international migration, decreased fertility, and increased mortality due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021, the nation’s growth was due to natural increase (148,043), which is the number of excess births over deaths, and net international migration (244,622).
This is the first time that net international migration (the difference between the number of people moving into the country and out of the country) has exceeded natural increase for a given year.
The voting-age resident population, adults age 18 and over, grew to 258.3 million, comprising 77.8% of the population in 2021.
The Covid-19 pandemic last year drove the biggest increase in death benefits paid by U.S. life insurers since the 1918 influenza epidemic, an industry trade group said.
Death-benefit payments rose 15.4% in 2020 to $90.43 billion, mostly due to the pandemic, according to the American Council of Life Insurers. In 1918, payments surged 41%.
The hit to the insurance industry was less than expected early in the pandemic because many of the victims were older people who typically have smaller policies. The industry paid out $78.36 billion in 2019, and payouts have typically increased modestly each year.
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In the 1918 flu pandemic, the number of U.S. deaths reached about 675,000, with mortality high in people younger than 5 years old, 20 to 40 years old, and 65 years and older, according to the CDC’s website.
The ACLI’s data show two other years, both in the 1920s, when year-over-year increases topped 15%, when there also were influenza epidemics, said Andrew Melnyk, the ACLI’s vice president of research and chief economist.
Today’s graphic from Paul Schmelzing, visiting scholar at the Bank of England (BOE), shows how global real interest rates have experienced an average annual decline of -0.0196% (-1.96 basis points) throughout the past eight centuries.
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Starting in 1311, data from the report shows how average real rates moved from 5.1% in the 1300s down to an average of 2% in the 1900s.
The average real rate between 2000-2018 stands at 1.3%.
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Demographics impact interest rates on a number of levels. The aging population—paired with declining fertility levels—result in higher savings rates, longer life expectancies, and lower labor force participation rates.
In the U.S., baby boomers are retiring at a pace of 10,000 people per day, and other advanced economies are also seeing comparable growth in retirees. Theory suggests that this creates downward pressure on real interest rates, as the number of people in the workforce declines.
Workers resigned from a record 4.4 million jobs in September, according to Labor Department data, and new surveys show that low-wage workers, employees of color and women outside the management ranks are those most likely to change roles. The findings signal that turnover isn’t evenly spread across the U.S. workforce even as employers across industries struggle to fill a variety of roles.
The overall percentage of people considering leaving their jobs — about three in 10, according to research by consulting firm Mercer LLC — is fairly consistent with historical trends. But sentiment varies across demographics and occupations. While front-line and low-wage positions typically see high rates of turnover, for example, employees in those roles are especially likely to leave now, Mercer found in a survey of 2,000 U.S. workers conducted in August.
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Nearly half of low-wage and front-line workers surveyed said their pay and benefits were insufficient while 41% said they felt burned out from demanding workloads. Some 35% of Black employees and 40% of Asian employees said they were considering leaving, compared with 26% of white employees.
