According to the theory of cumulative advantage/disadvantage, the state of an individual or community, in terms of income, lifestyle, psychology, health, etc., is not due to any one factor but is an accumulation of the outcomes of many different factors. In the case of old age and retirement, many factors such as life-long income, health and mental well-being all play a role in shaping how a person’s retirement will be. Childhood and young adulthood play a vital role in many ways.
It seems highly unlikely that a person’s economic status at this stage in life would be a very good indicator of how their retirement will be since, very often, an individual at this stage in life will not be an earner and will rely on their family for support. However, their psychological make-up will affect them greatly in retirement. Retirement is a both a loss and a gain – it is a loss because the routine built through having a job for several years will be broken and it is a gain because it opens up a huge array of possibilities for late life. In other words, the quality of retirement will depend on how much importance a person gives to having a job and keeping up a routine. This is developed in childhood and young adulthood when individuals are still constructing their psychology.
Retirement itself is only sometimes a personal choice, which could be driven by numerous factors such as dissatisfaction with work-life, longing for something different, etc. In other cases, it is an imposition by society where people are made to retire at a certain age because they are deemed to be at the end of the capacity to work at the same level of efficiency as younger workers. This would cause a dramatic drop in income, but other factors such as social security and retirement plans will help keep the individual’s socioeconomic status up.
The retirement calculator used information such as marital status (I am married), past income (I also have a full-time job) and retirement savings and social security to compute monetary requirements for retirement. Since given my current status, it seems that I am in good shape for retirement if I continue in this set pattern.
References:
‘AARP Retirement Calculator: Are You Saving Enough?’
https://secure.aarp.org/work/retirement-
planning/retirement_calculator.html#/your-retirement-income.
