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A new study has found that the majority of people think it's more likely than not that they'll still be working after age 65. And it doesn't necessarily have to do with money. According to a blog post from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, the study "Latent Work Capacity and Retirement Expectations" found that health was the chief barrier to people working longer, with "adults ranging in age from 18 to 70 … asked to rate themselves on a 1-to-7 scale for 52 different cognitive, physical, psychomotor, and sensory abilities that determine their capacity to work," said the post, with "abilities run[ning] the gamut from written comprehension, pattern recognition, and originality to finger dexterity, reaction time, and vision acuity."

Among those whose abilities did not diminish substantially as they aged (psychomotor abilities such as manual dexterity and coordination that were at peak for workers in their 30s but not substantially reduced for those in their 60s, and even cognitive decline, which only went through a minor decline for workers from age 50 and age 60), researchers were able to calculate the percentage of occupations each worker would be able to do out of a pool of 800 jobs, based on education and training levels.

Researchers discovered that over the life cycle, physical abilities decline the most, then psychomotor and sensory abilities, with cognitive abilities declining the least. That leads to concluding that "observed age-declines in ability are largely inframarginal to job demands, and therefore work capacity is relatively stable with age."

Among the findings were these: The more occupations people can do, the more likely they were to say they would work past 65; workers over 60 with a higher capacity to work said they would be more likely to remain employed even after hitting age 70; and a quarter of the retirees with a very high capacity for work would consider "unretiring" and returning to the labor force."

Even among the disabled, the ability to handle jobs increases the chance that they too will return to the workforce.

The results imply that if older people are capable of working, they'll do so—something that could make a big difference in how much they're able to save for eventual retirement (or how much they can earn to supplement any retirement income they're already receiving).

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Most people would opt to work after age 65 -- if they're capable

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