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

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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.