Few Americans Are Budgeting For Retirement

The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) just released their 20^th annual Retirement Confidence Survey. The stock market rally of the last 12 months helped to drive increased confidence levels. In fact, 16% of the survey respondents felt very confident about their ability to have enough money to retire. This was a significant increased from last year’s results when only 13% of the respondents felt very confident about their financial ability to retire.

While the increasing confidence shown by the American consumer is encouraging, the EBRI survey also shows that few Americans are budgeting for retirement. An astounding 31% of current workers have not yet even started saving for retirement.

You would think that the financial recession that we have experienced over the last two years would have caused more people to begin saving. However, only 60% of current workers are budgeting any money for retirement. So 40% of current workers are completely ignoring retirement budgeting.

Of the workers that haven’t even started saving for their retirement, 31% still feel confident that they will have enough money to retire.

A lack of financial budgeting may be the primary cause for so many Americans failing to save for their retirement. In fact, 54% of Americans have never even calculated how much money they will need in retirement. Without financial goals or targets to work towards it is no surprise that few Americans are budgeting any of their incomes towards retirement savings.