Never Retire - Maybe Generation X Didn't 'Prepare For Retirement' On Purpose

I hope you find our frequent reviews of academic work on retirement and retirement-related issues as insightful and helpful as I do.

Generally, I highlight research articles that add to our Never Retire narrative, particularly around working in retirement and physical and mental well-being.

It can also be interesting to see how academics handle the mainstream headlines around people not being “prepared for retirement.”

Sometimes, it’s interesting to see just how out of touch academia is when it comes to retirement. As much, if not more than the mainstream media. Or, to be slightly more kind, just how little they add to the conversation.

That said, we can still get some use out of their work, on the basis of their approach and discussion of the results.

Case in point—

The International Journal of Financial Studies just published an article, out of The University of Georgia, with the following title:

Retirement Preparedness of Generation X Compared to Other Cohorts in the United States

The real world usefulness of most research like this begins and ends with the theory the researchers use to guide their work.

In this article, the researchers used two theories.

The first couldn’t be any more out of touch with life on the ground in 2022.

The second captures the way we function—across generations—quite well, however the research doesn’t take the theory far enough into how we actually do life on the ground in 2022.

Because it’s an important comparison, I pull the full description of each theory directly from the paper.