Americans nearing retirement are having difficulty grappling with estate and retirement planning, according to a recent survey of 5,000 American households from Hearts & Wallets.

This is leading near-retirees to consult a variety of free sources for information or help; but older Americans are still hesitant to pay for professional financial advisory services, according to the survey.

A majority of respondents over the age of 40 expressed difficulties with retirement planning; meanwhile, 26% of respondents nearing retirement said they were uncomfortable handling their estate planning — a trend that isn’t necessarily driving more older Americans to turn to financial professionals for help.

Next Avenue writes on one of the survey’s key points:

Estate planning was a particular problem for a big chunk of both the pre-retirees and the retirees surveyed this year as well. In fact, of all the financial tasks Hearts & Wallets listed, estate planning was the only one a higher percentage of these groups said was harder in 2016 than last year: 26% said estate planning was somewhat or very difficult for them, up from 24% in 2015.

Yet only 8% of pre-retirees and retirees said they sought help for estate planning in the past 12 to 18 months. Varas believes that most aren’t looking for help from an estate-planning attorney because they’re not yet “exceedingly uncomfortable” about the topic. Also, she added, “Estate planning is not something you need to work on every day or something you need to update more than once a year, at most.”

But that isn’t translating into the hiring of financial professionals; older Americans love to go to free sources of financial advice — sometimes digital — but were hesitant to pay for services.

From the survey:

One more nugget from this report: Late-career people tend to favor getting free financial advice rather than paying financial advisers, and that’s an increasing trend.

In 2016, only 43% of late-career respondents said they paid financial professionals for advice. But 71% sought advice from all kinds of free sources — from mutual fund and brokerage phone reps to employers to family, friends and media — up 8 percentage points from 2015.

“They’re confused about the difference between calling a phone rep at, say, Fidelity, versus consulting with a financial adviser at, say, Wells Fargo Advisers,” said Varas. “They’re clear than an adviser is more expensive, but not clear whether what he or she does is better, and if so how.”

Another interesting data point:

More than half of the late-career (52%) and mid-career respondents (59%; age 40 to 52) said they are having difficulties with retirement planning.

Why?

“A lot of the retirement planning solutions today are very focused on the math of ‘providing income’ and I think life is a lot more complicated than that,” said Laura Varas, Hearts & Wallet’s founder and CEO. “There are hopes and dreams. For boomers, the list of things they want to accomplish is very salient for them and the hyper-rational solutions miss some of the emotional complexity of real life.”

Read the survey summary here.