From the U.S. to Europe, Australia and Japan, the World Economic Forum warned in a report published yesterday that retirement account balances aren’t increasing fast enough to cover rising life expectancy, Bloomberg News reported. The result could be workers outliving their savings by as much as a decade or more. “The size of the gap is such that it requires action” from policymakers, employers and individuals, said report co-author Han Yik, head of institutional investors at the World Economic Forum. Unless more is done, older people will either need to get by on less or postpone retirement, he said. In the U.S., the forum calculates that 65-year-olds have enough savings to cover just 9.7 years of retirement income. That leaves the average American man with a gap of 8.3 years. Women, who live longer, face a 10.9-year gap. The forum assumed retirees would need enough income to cover 70 percent of their pre-retirement pay, and didn’t include Social Security or other government welfare payments in the total. The retirement savings gap is about 10 years for men in the U.K., Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, the forum says. Longer-living women in those countries face an extra two to three years of financial uncertainty.
