Oh absolutely,
The young will never push for a rise in the retirement age. I certainly didn’t. At 20 I fully expected to be well off by the time I was 40 and that thing called retirement was something so far over the horizon that it didn’t really matter much. In any event the dinosaurs I sat next to at work were forever banging on about how good our scheme was, the very pride of the golden goose! Then life happened.
The retirement scheme was made more expensive. Employers of funded schemes availed themselves of contribution holidays content to believe that the sun would always shine. Then came the deluge. The economy tanked. The scheme was frozen to new members. Then it was frozen to existing contributions. Then it was turned into a supreme burden that had to be hived off into a quasi-state protection scheme with significantly reduced terms, in order to protect our jobs.
In much the same way your retirement planning can be wrecked by significant stock market, bond or commodity price falls, the end result is the same.You either work longer to try and salvage the position you want or need, or you resign (no pun) yourself to a poorer and weaker retirement. It is inevitable that many people will do whatever they can and take whatever opportunities are available to them in order to protect theirs and their families futures. If that means working longer, then so be it.
On the subject of life getting in the way, things such as children, divorce, redundancy, luck, and a catalogue of other things are for most people going to radically modify their retirement planning as the intervening years pass. As the young get older (and it happens much faster than they expect) their perceptions are very likely to change.
Before they know it, retirement is visible on the horizon and the potential number of paydays can be counted in double digits. The loss of those potential paydays starts to hit home.
When you look at the the pension realities on the table for people coming up through the system these days, it isn’t pretty. Dismissing the risk of Defined contribution pensions, the lifetime limit (beyond which there are punitive tax charges) of currently £1m, is only likely to generate a joint income of around £28k a year in annuity. A lot of people are going to take every opportunity to “stash the cash” while they are still able to, and that is likely to be in the last few years of employment once the mortgage is paid off. It is in this environment that the young of today are eventually going to reverse their opinion.......Watch!