If you haven’t saved enough for retirement, one possible solution is working longer. But a new report by the Employee Benefit Research Institute* paints a somewhat bleak view of the benefit of doing so. The study suggests that if you haven’t saved enough in your working years, even working into your 80s won’t help.
It’s another “retirement blues” story—even working longer, a widely-touted strategy, just won’t help.
In my last post, I asked if you have a specific number in mind when it comes to saving for retirement, how you arrived at that number, whether you’re on track to reaching it—and, if not, what it would take to get you there.
Your response was tremendous, with more than 300 of you writing in. As Philip Moeller wrote in his blog, “the responses to Rinaldi’s blog post are uniformly thoughtful and heartfelt. Rinaldi learned a lot from them. So did I. So can you. Enormous amount of information, wise counsel, and guidance shared.”
The “future of retirement” seems very much on the public’s mind. The topic is surfacing in the press, in the institutional marketplace, and will be the focus of a Washington, D.C., policy forum I’m attending in May. Here are some of my thoughts. I welcome your comments and will try to incorporate them in my upcoming discussions.
It’s very clear that there is a future for retirement. But to me, it’s really a tale of two futures: the future of retirement income, and the future of retirement health benefits.
My recent post on the government’s fiscal outlook generated several thoughtful comments.
Two readers mentioned Paul Krugman’s op-ed on Social Security in The New York Times. It is true, as Krugman points out, that Social Security is only a modest part of the fiscal problem. Using statistics from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), federal spending on health programs and Social Security is expected to grow from 10% of GDP to 16% over the next quarter century. About 1% of that growth is due to Social Security, according to CBO; the other 5% is due to health programs.
The long-term budget outlook for the federal government is bleak. What is surprising is that this is considered news.
The forces driving the U.S.’s long-term budget problem have been known for decades. We’ve also known for years that sometime in this decade, the outlook would begin to worsen considerably. And now it has. And no, the deteriorating fiscal situation has little to do with stimulus spending, bank or auto bailouts, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
