People have accused the baby boomers of being whiners almost since we were born. But just wait until we get to retirement age and discover that we don’t have nearly enough money to take care of our “golden years.” That’s going to be the ultimate generational bummer.<\/p>\n
I’ve been gathering some data about what I’ll call, with the usual boomer understatement, the “retirement crisis.” My mentors have been Eugene Ludwig, the head of the consulting firm Promontory Financial Group, and his colleague Michael Foot. The numbers show a genuinely frightening gap between what people have saved for retirement and what they will need. And many of these studies don’t take into account last year’s stock market crash, which will make the problem worse.<\/p>\n
Let’s start with the basic fact that only about half of Americans have any employer-sponsored retirement plan at all. The other folks will have to depend on Social Security. For a typical boomer worker, that would mean a monthly benefit of about $2,400 at a retirement age of 66 in 2020. On that, you won’t be able to afford many Starbucks lattes.<\/p>\n