TIAA survey: 53% of adults fear outliving savings more than underspending

TIAA's 2026 Retirement in the Age of AI and GLP-1s Survey, published this morning, isolates a fear that advisors usually hear in fragments and rarely in one sentence: of 1,000 U.S. adults aged 18 to 65, 53% told the firm they worry more about outliving their savings than about underspending and not enjoying retirement. The survey describes a client base bracing for a stretch of years whose end it cannot see—and increasingly asking whether its savings can produce income that lasts.

That majority is not the whole story, since 83% of respondents said they had financial concerns about living longer and, asked which costs worried them most, named basic expenses (46%), a lack of disposable income to enjoy retirement (42%), and healthcare (41%)—a budget under pressure from ordinary living and medical costs at once, stretched across a retirement whose length no one in the survey could name.

Artificial intelligence adds a less familiar second layer: one-third of adults said they were very concerned that AI could threaten their earning potential before retirement, and among pre-retirees the numbers sharpen to 14% extremely concerned and 19% very concerned about AI's impact on their careers. The worry sorts sharply by age, with 42% of Gen Z adults saying they are extremely or very concerned about AI's effect on their career and retirement savings, against 33% of Millennials and 28% of Gen X and Baby Boomers combined.

That skew is where the survey gets useful at the desk. The group reporting the most AI anxiety is also the group with the most years left to save, which stretches any career disruption across a longer stretch of the compounding window and gives an advisor more time to plan around it. For a younger client whose income the technology may reshape, the question is whether the savings rate is high enough and, just as much, whether the income funding the plan is as stable as the plan assumes.

TIAA executives frame these as a single issue: Tim Pitney, the firm's head of lifetime income distribution, wrote in an email to PLANADVISER that "longevity deserves the most immediate attention, because rising costs and AI disruption are really longevity problems in disguise," reasoning that rising costs erode purchasing power over a longer retirement while AI-driven career disruption shortens the years workers have to build savings in the first place.

Jason Key, who leads consultant relations at TIAA, told PLANADVISER that what stood out to him was how thoroughly the concerns have merged in participants' minds. "A few years ago, we'd have studied these as separate issues; now participants are connecting them instinctively," he wrote. The practical consequence, in his telling, is that the question has moved from accumulation to conversion—participants are asking less whether they have saved enough and more whether their plan can turn those savings into income that lasts.

The decumulation argument this publication has made before is that the last mile of retirement — Social Security claiming, healthcare spend, survivor floors, the conversion of a balance into a paycheck — is where advisory relationships are increasingly decided, and where plan design is being pushed to follow. A survey finding that participants themselves are connecting longevity, cost, and career risk is evidence that the demand side has caught up to the supply side.

The survey also probed how AI might reshape health spending itself: 27% of adults said AI will increase healthcare costs by creating expensive new breakthrough treatments, while 22% said it will lower them. Both answers feed the retirement math, since healthcare was one of the three cost buckets respondents named first and treatments that extend life also extend the number of years a portfolio has to fund.

For advisors, the takeaways are concrete: clients in the longevity-anxious majority need a vague fear converted into a dated projection, a decumulation plan that puts real numbers on healthcare, basic living, and discretionary spending across several assumed lifespans, while younger clients carrying the AI anxiety need an income-durability plan that asks what happens to savings if a layoff arrives at 40 instead of 62 and whether a guaranteed-income sleeve inside or alongside the plan absorbs part of that shock.

The survey measures what participants say they want—income that lasts—but not how many plans have built the option to provide it, and that gap is where the next round of sponsor conversations likely begins.