Staying Optimistic: Older Americans’ Retirement Expectations Remain Uninterrupted Despite COVID-19 Impact

Employees’ retirement expectations have played important roles in predicting retirement decisions, making policy proposals, and designing financial products and services to help American workers better plan for their future retirement. From stochastic retirement readiness model design to Social Security benefits projection estimations and from defined contribution (DC) plan saving strategy to Monte Carlo retirement goals success rate calculations, people’s expected retirement age is a crucial factor for industry advisors, academics, and financial planners to design retirement services and projection models, study decision behaviors, and make sound advice for their clients. In this Issue Brief, we focus on investigating the potential influence of COVID-19 on the participants’ working and financial situations in 2020, as well as their decisions regarding retirement and Social Security claiming ages.