I found this article recently in The Motley Fool, 4 Things Baby Boomers Need to Know About Retirement Planning. Here are several excepts:
With Americans living longer than we used to decades ago, retirement planning has become more important than ever. Fail to plan, save, and invest effectively, and you may find yourself in a precarious financial condition in retirement. This is most important for Baby Boomers, as they’re already approaching or living in retirement. Here are four important things they need to know.
Social Security: Many changes are being proposed to strengthen Social Security, including a handful of potentially negative changes, such as raising the retirement age, cutting benefits for higher-income workers, and decreasing the rate of cost-of-living increases. However, few (if any) politicians want to make any such changes for individuals getting close to retirement.
Finally, history shows that something will likely be done to shore up Social Security before the situation gets much worse. What exactly it will be is anyone’s guess at this point, but if you’re in the 52-to-70 age group, you should not be worried too much about your future Social Security benefits.
Life Expectancy: A common mistake is to look at life expectancies as of birth, and project them forward. For instance, overall life expectancies have slowly risen from about 70 years half a century ago to 78 years currently, and so many retirees believe that they should plan only to live that long.
The problem with that method is that it ignores the fact that life expectancies at birth account for things that can happen to you before you reach retirement age. In other words, because you’ve already survived many of the things that can lead to a premature death, your life expectancy at 65 is longer than than the expectancy you would calculate using figures based on birth.
Continue Reading the complete source article.
