When it comes to socking it away for retirement, automatic features make all the difference.
That's according to pre-retirees between the ages of 50 and 62 with household income of at least $80,000, who were surveyed by Ipsos Public Affairs in a study commissioned by New York Life.
According to 64 percent of respondents, specific automatic savings vehicles, designed to help people save in a disciplined, recurring way, gave them greater confidence going into retirement than other kinds of savings.
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Autopilot methods including direct deposit into a 401(k) plan, a mortgage, or permanent life insurance were among the techniques mentioned.
Respondents liked them so well that 45 percent said there ought to be more automated ways to save.
But that doesn't mean that that age group is confident about their ability to retire—in fact, they believe they should have started much earlier.
While the average age at which they report beginning to save seriously is 34, they wish they'd begun an average of 8 years earlier. Tell that to the average 26-year-old and see how far you get.
Still, a quarter of respondents said that hindsight told them they should have begun more than 10 years earlier.
It also doesn't mean that they're finding it easy to save now—particularly those who have kids still at home; 58 percent of them said it's tough to save anything outside of those auto-deduct options they're already using.
Those folks with kids still at home are also the ones predominantly in favor of more automatic savings options; 58 percent of them said so, compared with the 45 percent among the general respondent population.
Men, predictably, are more confident in their automatic savings, with 68 percent of male pre-retirees and 59 percent of women reporting more confidence in their autopilot savings than in other forms of savings.
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