A Conceptual Review on the Effect of Attitudes towards Retirement on Saving Intentions and Retirement Planning Behavior

Abstract

Retirement planning has been the major concern for many years and is becoming an increasingly prominent issue faced by people nowadays. Retirement planning behavior is defined as people’s behavior towards their retirement planning. Therefore, attitudes toward retirement might lead to the formation of saving intentions to perform the retirement planning behavior. Past studies have indicated that planning has impacted on the saving behavior as well as to the portfolio choice. It is further emphasized that those planners who have retirement planning arrive close to retirement have a high level of wealth and show higher financial literacy than non-planners. The necessity of individuals to increase retirement savings had over a wide promoted, however, the understanding on individual motivation towards savings at higher rates still remains sparse. For those employees who are willing to retire from work, they should have enough savings to cover their needs during retirement. Unfortunately, findings from previous study showed that many people do not start to prepare and save for their retirement till very late in life-cycle, and do not manage to have adequate savings for their retirement. As a contribution to the literature, the present paper theoretically conceptualizes specifically only on the role of savings intention as a mediator between attitudes toward retirement and retirement planning behavior. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior, it is suggested that the behavioral intention is the closest predictor of behavior. Hence, the stronger the intention to perform a behavior, the greater the probability that the behavior should occur. The recommendations for future studies are proposed.