Ben Stein writes this personal finance op-ed for the NY Sunday Times in which he illuminates the mounting retirement finance problem that is confronting the Baby Boomer generation:
This is the bore of the gun pointed right between the eyes of the baby boomers. With the low interest rates of today and tomorrow, with the lavish way we have come to expect to live, with a stock market that is sluggish, let us say, what on earth are we going to do about retirement?
Unfortunately, this is not just a paranoid fantasy about my own life. This is going to be the reality of millions, maybe tens of millions of baby boomers unless they get their backsides into gear and make some serious changes in their lives.
You can look at it anecdotally, or you can look at it statistically. Anecdotally: If you are a woman in your mid-50’s living on a salary of $150,000 a year, and if you wish to maintain your living standard when you retire at age 65, you will need about $200,000 a year to live on, assuming inflation raises prices by 3 percent a year. If you assume you will get about $15,000 a year from Social Security, you will need about another $185,000 a year. To have that much income with today’s interest rates, you will probably need about $4.6 million in the bank. Do you have it?
Or, we can look at it statistically. About 77 million baby boomers are racing toward retirement. That’s people roughly between 40 and 60 years old. More than 34 percent of the ones over 55 report having financial savings (not counting their home equity) of less than $50,000. Only 21 percent have more than $100,000. The average Social Security benefit as of 2003 was only $895 a month. Only roughly one in eight workers as of 2001 had a pension with a defined benefit (as opposed to a defined contribution).
We can look at it another way. If you had to retire in 10 years with (now let’s be really generous here) twice the savings you now have, and would receive interest of 4 percent on it, how close would you be to having a living income, i.e. an income you could live on at your present style of life? Be honest.
You can look at it still another way. The average family in the New York area earns roughly (and I mean really roughly) $50,000 a year. You would need to have at least $1.25 million in principal to yield that income at 4 percent. Do you have it?
And the solution?
Major league retirement planning right here and now. Right this second. Make a plan with an adviser you trust and for whom you have gotten superb references. Make it a plan with a lot of diversification of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, foreign, domestic, emerging, variable annuities (but study them carefully – there are immense variations among them), real estate and even cash.
The plan has to allow for expensive, long-term medical care. It has to provide for the possibility of losing your job at some point before you reach retirement age. The plan cannot count on miracle cures from the federal government. The federal government is just a means of transferring money from wage earners to retirees – and the wage earners are not going to want to bankrupt themselves for the baby boomers (who got all of the good music anyway).
Read the entire piece.
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