RETIREMENT
Connie Spencer, 68, a senior fraud investigator at Alliance Data, works from home in Columbus. Spencer is putting off retirement until she is 70 years old.
nearly the same age: 64.6 for college graduates and 64.1 for high school graduates.
“We see people intending to work a whole lot longer, but the problem is that for the most part, it’s a lot easier for the college graduates to fulfill that plan,” Rutledge said.
This divide between highly- and less-educated Americans begins long before
the golden years, when college graduates make more money than their peers. That’s driving a split in retirement savings: Typical households run by someone with a college degree have $116,900 in a retirement account, more than triple the $36,000 median for households run by someone with only a high school diploma.
According to government
figures, 19.2 percent of Americans 65 and over were employed in September, tied for the highest rate since 1962 and nearly double the level of the mid-1980s.
Incentives are aligned for people to keep working, even past their mid-60s.
Consider someone who turns 66 this year and would get $1,000 monthly as their Social Security benefit. If that person had retired at 62, their monthly benefit would have been $750. For each year they delay getting benefits past 66, that monthly benefit will grow by 8 percent, until age 70.
After doing her own Social Security calculation, Connie Spencer of the Northeast Side in Columbus decided to keep working until she turned 70.
“Right now, I couldn’t afford to live on what I would get from Social Security,” said Spencer, a 68-year-old senior fraud investigator for Alliance Data.
She said she lost most of her retirement when the stock market started slipping
more than a decade ago.
“It took most of my retirement that I had saved up at that time,” said Spencer, who owned beauty salons and worked in real estate at the time.
By working until 70, Spencer will collect an additional $600 a month from Social Security.
“It’s a substantial difference,” Spencer said. “You have to do it.”
Robert Johnson, 66, of Gahanna, works two days a week as a shuttle driver for the Hilton Corp. to keep his mind sharp.
“I want to keep my mind moving all the time,” said Johnson, who retired at age 58 after working for the Ohio Board of Regents for 22 years and at Cuyahoga Community College for a few years.
The Ohio State University graduate plans to work two more years.
“If you retire, what’s next?” he asked. “And if you don’t’ retire, what’s next?”