How old do you feel? Brits are most likely to start feeling old when they reach their 50s or 60s, according to new research published today.
The Aegon Financial Priorities Survey 2024 showed that 20% of people start ‘feeling old’ in their 60s. That was closely followed by 19% feeling old in their 50s.
Against that, 14% of young-at-heart respondents claimed that they were still feeling youthful into their 70s. Meanwhile, a surprisingly high number of 9% of positive people said they don’t think they will ever feel old.
Steven Cameron, director of pensions at Aegon, said: “Not so long ago, people tried to comfort themselves that rather than being past your best, ‘life begins at 40’. Then there was a period when you’d hear ‘50 is the new 40’ – so perhaps another way of looking at this research is that 60 is now the new 40.”
With the fact that, on average, people in the UK are living longer, there could be a grain of truth in what he said. It’s now estimated that a quarter of all children born today will live to almost 100.
Mr Cameron said that regardless of how old or young you feel, “it’s vital that we individually and collectively give thought towards how we plan for and navigate this phase of life.”
Jonathan Bland, head geek at Pension Geeks, said: “In our experience of going into workplaces and doing hundreds of live TV shows, we’ve never ever met someone who has any regret of saving too much into their pension at the time of retiring or getting near to it.”
The survey also looked at what advice we would give our younger self if we could travel back in time. Given a range of options, more than half – 51% – said they would tell themselves to “start saving as early as possible.”
Other popular advice included taking care of our health, at 42%, and to worry less about what others think, at 33%.
* The research was conducted among 2,000 UK adults, weighted to be nationally representative criteria. Fieldwork dates 12th – 17th January 2024 by Opinium.
