I think it was George Burns a childhood favorite of mine who once joked that "Retirement at 65 is ridiculous. When I was 65, I still had pimples."
Despite that, dreaming (and sometimes planning) for retirement is as American as family vacation road trips, never-ending health care premiums jumps and home ownership. (Well, maybe we better scratch that last one)
At any rate, retirement is a lot like marriage: everybody thinks about it, but it rarely turns out as planned.
Well, now we don't even have that anymore. A new Hartford study sheds some light on growing concerns about and lowered expectations for the retirement dream as we know it.
Not surprisingly, the No. 1 retirement concern today? Simply making ends meet. A whopping 65 percent of people interviewed ranked it their top priority up from just 24.5 percent two short years ago. Ouch. So much for the stimulus.
But just as striking is what the experts over at Hartford are calling "a house divided," a picture of Americans on two increasingly divergent paths: those who plan and those who don't. The growing confidence gap between the two of them is startling, to say the least.
The planners (as the study's authors dub them) are those who've done just that: planned for retirement. While, apparently, the so-called non-planners are just winging it (or they're in publishing).
Anyway, the point is that the study found that the planners were three times more likely to be confident about their level of retirement income versus the non-planners. (Sounds like the price of planning is worth it just for the piece of mind.)
And while half of those surveyed admitted retirement planning remains too complex for anyone to go it alone, very few felt confident enough to do so.
But this story wraps with a morale that smacks of Quentin Tarantino more than Walt Disney. Confidence is low across the board. Nearly 80 percent of Americans remain confident their income will cover their retirement. Worse, more than 31 percent don't have a clue when they'll even be able to retire if at all.
Not sure about you, but that sounds like an awful lot of people looking for guidance. To paraphrase Mr. Burns again, maybe it's time to look to the future, because that's where you (and your clients) are going to spend the rest of your lives.
