Justin Fox, Columnist

The Remarkable Financial Benefits of Delaying Retirement

Waiting just a few months has enormous advantages no matter how much you make.

January 23, 2018 at 4:55 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Working longer, living longer.
Photographer: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images

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You're 49 years old, you make $113,000 a year and you're starting to get worried about financing your retirement. You could take the drastic step of upping your retirement savings by 10 percent of your salary. Or you could achieve the same result by retiring two years and five months later than you had been planning to.

This is one of a number of such comparisons in a remarkable new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, "The Power of Working Longer," that I imagine is going to become a staple of retirement advice in the coming years. The authors are Gila Bronshtein, Jason Scott, John B. Shoven and Sita N. Slavov. Shoven is a Stanford economics professor and longtime retirement guru who, at age 70, is practicing what he preaches. Bronshtein, Scott and Slavov all got their doctorates in economics from Stanford in the past 15 years and are now working at, respectively, Cornerstone Research, Financial Engines and George Mason University.