wealthwire. Posted by Cori O'Donnell - Thursday, November 17th, 2011

Americans delay retirement plans, according to a survey by Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), 80 is the new 65.

Americans are finding they need to remain on the workforce longer so they can save enough money to retire.

Wells Fargo surveyed 1,500 Americans whose income was between $25,000 and $99,999 and ranged in age from 20 up into their 70s. Participants were asked “… questions about retirement, savings and Social Security,” reports Reuters.

According to Bloomberg:

“About 76 percent of respondents said it’s more important to reach a specific dollar amount before retiring, compared with 20 percent who said it’s more important to retire at a given age, regardless of savings, according to the survey of adults with household incomes or assets from about $25,000 to $100,000.”

The survey also revealed that 74 percent of respondents expect to have to work during retirement, 39 percent say they will need to and the other 35 percent just want to continue to work. Twenty-five percent said they expect to work until they reach 80 because they do not have adequate savings to retire sooner.

Joe Ready, Wells Fargo’s director of Institutional Retirement and Trust, told Reuters "that raises a lot of social and economic implications. Will they have the physical ability to work, the mental capacity? What does that mean for the younger work force in terms of coming through and looking to get ahead?"

Here is a visual representation of the trend in workers’ expected retirement ages from 1991-2010:

When surveyed about saving for retirement, 53 percent said they need to cut back on spending now.

The chart below, provided by Gallup, shows the declining optimism of people towards their financial comfort when they retire:

“People are starting to move toward understanding the different levers of what they’re going to have to do to make it in retirement,” Ready said.

About 68 percent of people surveyed are not confident enough with the stock market to place their money there.

“About 45 percent of respondents said if they were given $5,000 they would buy a certificate of deposit, and 50 percent said they’d invest it in stocks or mutual funds,” according to Bloomberg.

There is a helpful alternative though that people just pass by because of the lack of confidence in stocks.

From Bloomberg:

“The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index returned 1.32 percent this year through Nov. 14. One-year CDs yielded 0.35 percent and five-year CDs paid 1.19 percent on average as of Nov. 3, according to Bankrate.com, an online provider of consumer-rate information and a unit of Bankrate Inc.”

 The average savings of those surveyed was only $25,000 towards retirement when realistically they say they’d need an average of $350,000 to support themselves after retiring...