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{"id":5368,"date":"2016-09-23T09:30:05","date_gmt":"2016-09-23T15:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=5368"},"modified":"2016-09-23T09:30:05","modified_gmt":"2016-09-23T15:30:05","slug":"what-is-normal-retirement-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2016\/09\/what-is-normal-retirement-age.html","title":{"rendered":"What is “normal retirement age”?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Social_security_card.gif;$ <\/p>\n

Just a question, for now, for reader thoughts.<\/p>\n

There were a couple articles I came across recently about retirement trends with a common theme. \u00a0For instance, an article that women were retiring at a later age than in the past, since they\u2019d typically retired \u201cyoung\u201d because, on average, they were younger than their husbands, and wanted to retire alongside him when he left at a \u201cnormal\u201d retirement age. \u00a0Another article, featuring a man trying to make up for lost time, lest he need to retire at the too-old age of 70. \u00a0Another article, on the other hand, proposing moving the eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 62.<\/p>\n

Folks, the normal retirement age for Social Security had been 65 since its implementation \u2014 but for people retiring now, and for the past 7 years, it\u2019s already moved to age 66, and will continue to increase until, for those of us born in 1960 or later, normal retirement age will be age 67<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, in practical terms, what this means is that the baseline benefit formula is calculated based on a retirement at that specified age. \u00a0Social Security will still let you retire as early as age 62, but if you continue to do so, or even if you stay at that old norm of 65, you\u2019ll experience a benefit cut relative to your elders. \u00a0 (Other countries don\u2019t let you take benefits early; and we could have adjusted the early retirement age from 62 upwards, but didn\u2019t.)<\/p>\n

So the only way in which, in practice, this NRA change will work as a true \u201cretirement age\u201d change rather than a benefit cut, is if, in actual practice, workers actually start delaying retirement. \u00a0(Yes, I know that\u2019s circular.) \u00a0And the fact that Medicare begins at age 65 works against this, because it reinforces the idea that retirement begins at 65.<\/p>\n

So I would be curious as to whether or not public opinion has evolved on this point or not. \u00a0In other words, if you asked a group of people what they thought \u201cretirement age\u201d was \u2014 when you\u2019re neither \u201cretiring early\u201d nor \u201cretiring late\u201d but retiring at the \u201cnormal\u201d time \u2014 what would they say? \u00a0Has there been any shift? \u00a0Likely not.<\/p>\n

And since I\u2019ve never seen such a poll, I\u2019ll ask my readers, as a proxy. \u00a0What do you think?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

image:\u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Social_security_card.gif; originally produced by the Social Security Administration and in the public domain<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"