By Tom Keyser
You've lived the good life. You cut your teeth on the Beatles, cut your hair for a career, traveled, eaten in fancy restaurants, lived in nice houses and owned flashy cars. As a vibrant member of the live-for-today generation, you've indulged your passions.
Now, as one of the 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, you and other baby boomers are looking ahead to retirement. For perhaps the first time in your privileged life, the view isn't quite so grand.
Granted, you see increased longevity; studies say you might live to be 100. And you plan to remain active; heck, you might be attending Rolling Stones' concerts when you're 80. But the sobering question is: How will you pay for Stones' tickets, trips to see the grandkids in Kansas and other expenses during a retirement that could last as long as your working career?
"In the next five to 20 years, we're going to see a lot of people who think they're going to be ready for retirement, and all of a sudden, they're going to work out the numbers, look at how much money they've saved and realize, 'I can't retire,' says Steven Bouchey, president and CEO of Bouchey Financial Group in Troy. "I always say that everybody dreams about retiring on a hill overlooking a lake. Many people are going to be retiring in a trailer overlooking a swamp."
Rules Change
For baby boomers, the oldest of whom will be eligible for early retirement next year when they turn 62, the rules changed during their working life. Their parents had likely worked for one company for decades and retired with a pension, Social Security and a paid-off home mortgage.
Baby boomers didn't want to stay put that long. They changed jobs. They moved. They took out new mortgages. At the same time, companies began slashing or eliminating pensions, shifting the responsibility of saving for retirement to the individual. For most baby boomers, a comfortable retirement will depend on whether they have invested adequately in their 401(k), IRA or other personal savings plan.
"Retirement isn't an easy situation anymore," says Carl Misner, a financial adviser in Latham representing AIG Financial Advisors. "More and more responsibility falls on the individual, but the problem is that the individual is not trained in financial matters."
Instead of saving, many boomers continued spending. And those who saved put their faith in the stock market.
"Having spent freely on plasma TVs and SUVs -- choosing to live for today -- we have managed to accumulate few savings while becoming awash in debt," write Ken Dychtwald and Daniel J. Kadlec in their book The Power Years: A User's Guide to the Rest of Your Life (John Wiley, 2005). "Boomers have never been big savers to begin with, but during the boom years of the 1990s, we basically stopped saving at all, optimistically figuring that the stock market would keep rising 20 percent a year and, in our plans to build a nest egg, do the heavy lifting for us. That didn't work out so well."
Now What?
If you wonder whether you have saved enough for retirement, then you probably haven't, financial advisers say. You need a plan.
"Most people spend more time planning a vacation than they do planning their retirement," says Bouchey, the Troy adviser. "The very first thing we tell each and every one of our clients is: Go home and put together a budget. Make believe you're retired today."
What you'll find, he says, is that few expenses go away, except maybe college costs for your children. Then again, people are having children later in life. They might be just starting college when you're thinking about retiring.
Saving for retirement requires sacrifice and discipline and, for most people, a financial planner. Figuring out which investments are right for you can be overwhelming.
Invest as much as you can, but figure on at least 10 percent to 15 percent of your earnings, especially if you haven't started saving yet.
Reduce your spending and invest the savings.
Move into a more reasonable house. Quit going out to eat all the time. Bring your lunch to work. Buy a car that gets better gas mileage. Lower the thermostat in winter and raise it in summer. Vacation closer to home.
Before you buy anything, make sure you need it, or consider buying a cheaper version, whether it's a car or a bottle of wine.
"Too many people think they can't afford to save," says Misner, the adviser from Latham. "That's the biggest problem. It's always being put off for what we always think are well-meaning projects."
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