Plan to retire later? Better have a Plan B

Americans are getting a lot of well-intentioned advice these days to delay retirement if they possibly can. We’ve talked about the reasons to postpone any number of times here.

But good advice and economic reality sometimes get out of sync, as a new report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute shows. It found that in 2009, 47 percent of retirees have actually left the workforce earlier than they had planned to.

There are many explanations for that, of course, but the two biggest come down to health: the retirees’ health or their companies’ health.

What this suggests to me (aside from going easy on the curly fries) is that one plan for retirement is no longer enough. Most of us probably need two: the everything goes according to schedule one, and a backup that anticipates what we’d do if retirement comes sooner than expected.

Given that many Americans have no plan at all, this may be asking a lot, but one can hope. --Greg Daugherty

Greg writes the “Retirement Guy” column each month in the Consumer Reports Money Adviser newsletter.

Comments

[Robert Keilitz]

Many retirement "plans" that I read and hear about, as well as a majority of the concerns people express about their future, revolve around being about to maintain a particular lifestyle for an indefinite period of time. I think that many of these concerns could be alleviated if both people and plans began to think in terms lifestyles that mean, not necessarily of doing with less, but rather of not needing more. The concept of HAVING ENOUGH, if you will. I have found, at an age at which I am too young to retire, but at which I retired anyway, that I don’t need anything; meaning that I have all that I need, and to acquire something new would necessitate that I throw out something that is still working fine and meeting all my needs. This doesn’t mean that things around my home don’t even break and need replacing… they certainly do, especially when you have as many thumbs as I do. But thumbs or not, I have found that I no longer time of a vehicle after two or three years, that a 50 inch television of good enough, even if it DOESN’T have Ethernet capabilities and can stream movies directly, that I don’t need that “Everything” channel package, and the cupboards, the range, the refrigerator, the microwave all work just fine without being able to respond to voice commands. In short, I’m happy and satisfied and I spend a remarkable amount of time NOT worrying about tomorrow, next week, or next year. I love retirement.