Employee Benefit Research Institute

And NERS is not the only one that is seeing it, which I think confirms kind of a result, but is also a problematic one.

The long running survey that we do, Retirement Confidence Survey with EBRI, It's the lowest confidence that we've measured in the last decade, something like that happened this year.

And then the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, which they've been tracking for more than 50 years, so it's a lot to get your mind around that dynamic.

The absolute floor of consumer sentiment happened earlier this year.

We've talked to legit millionaires who have plenty of money, and they won't touch it because they're just... fearful of something that might happen, like irrationally scared of pulling from assets when we kind of like want to touch earnings that they make.

And I think retirement and kind of all the longevity stuff that we scare people with is legitimately kind of worrying to people and makes them not act rational they or it's rational in a way they're kind of being protective of it um but it's not kind of get into retirement and kind of play by a kind of simplistic drawdown system

yeah And at the risk of piling on, EBRI had a good study, Employee Benefits Research Institute.

And after 20 years, they looked at longitudinally, how are people doing compared to what they had when they retired? Big chunk in different income brackets or wealth brackets.

guests from Morningstar Center for Retirement and Policy Studies.

Spencer Look is Associate Director of Retirement Studies for Morningstar, and Jack VanDerhei is Director of Retirement Studies for the Center and previously worked as the Research Director at the Employee Benefit Research Institute from 1996 through 2022.

So Christine, Spencer and Jack both produce a lot of really helpful research on retirement outcomes, social security reform, and retirement policy.

So we'll get into all of those topics in our discussion.

In fact, inflation ranked above health care costs 87%, a major market downturn 81%, and outliving assets 68%.

And they were looking at an EBRI, employee benefit research.

Yeah, the institute.

They said 58% of workers say they're confident they'll be able to keep up with inflation.

[upbeat music]

The median retirement age in the United States, the Employee Benefit Research Institute tells us, is 62.

That can obviously move up or down depending on how you save.

And if you do get the chance to clock out early, though, you might finally have the time to do all those things you have been putting off.

And what do we mean by that? So listen to this.

Nearly half of retirees in a 2026 Employee Benefit Research Institute, the EBRI, Retirement Confidence Survey, said they retired earlier than they planned to.

Now, a retirement date, it might be your goal, right? The big goal.

But the financial plan is It's got to work either way, even when life changes what you thought was going to be your retirement calendar.

Rather, they're able to find different sources, different mechanisms to get their financial information.

If you look at this, this was a study done by the Employee Benefit Research Institute that said, okay, where do people get information from for a retirement plan? Like, how do they inform and educate themselves if they don't do this professional? It's interesting.

A lot of folks get their advice from family and friends.

A number of people do it from, like, online resources or personal research.

[upbeat music] Let's start with the skill nobody taught you.

The most devastating retirement statistic that I will read you all year is from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, and it's about as sober and unglamorous an organization as exists in America.

But they published new research this spring tracking real retirees over decades, and they found that among people who retired with $500,000 or more, six in ten still had at least 80% of their money a full decade into retirement.

45% had more money than they started with.