Exploring how to engage Swedish Millennials with pension planning

Sammanfattning: An aging Swedish population is putting an increased pressure on the Swedish pension system. To address this, the Swedish pension system was reformed in the late 1990s. This reformation resulted in an increased individual responsibility for pension investments among the Swedish population. The individual responsibility has shown to be challenging for many since they feel a great uncertainty in this area. Adding to the notion that the Swedish population is aging; young Swedes are also entering the working life later than before, without planning to retire later than the current seniors. This will implicate that a smaller part of the retirement payments will come from the national public pension, making the individual's pension planning more important. This means that the role of occupational pension and private savings has and will grow in importance years to come.Even so, private pension savings among young people is decreasing. Young people born between 1980 and 2000, often denoted Millennials (also called Generation Y) in literature, are an interesting cohort to research, since they will be the first generation to experience the full impact of the new Swedish pension system. Recent studies indicate that this generation has low interest for pension planning and that they find information about pensions hard to understand. The study will, therefore, investigate how Swedish Millennials could become better informed, engaged and active in their pension planning.The study was conducted through interviews with five representatives from the Swedish pension industry and a survey with 146 Swedish Millennials.Findings indicated that the Millennials’ current attitudes towards pension have a negative impact on their pension planning behaviour. It has been concluded that Millennials engagement to pension planning can be strengthened by improving four factors: Relevance, Content, Channels and Motivation