Long Retirement, Meet Price Tag

Oct. 25, 2005 — -- Ryan Jantzen, a financial adviser in northern California, has a 12-year-old client with $4,000 invested in an IRA. That's right -- an Individual Retirement Account.

Pre-teen investors are rare birds even for experienced retirement planners like Jantzen, but they represent a logical extension of the savings advice he and others can't stress enough: start early, start now, start yesterday.

"What people need to do is assess where they are and what they want in retirement, and discuss it with their spouse, because they're not always the same," Jantzen said.

Americans' lengthening life expectancy, coupled with a wider desire to retire well before the traditional early- to mid-60s target, means that retirement is more often a span of several decades rather than several years.

Those trends combine with other facts of modern life to make saving for retirement a daunting proposition, however. Results of an annual Retirement Reality Check survey released this month by Allstate Insurance show that financing retirement tied with terrorism as the issue people are most worried about -- well above worries about health, family, career and current finances.

"It's becoming more difficult for people to save at the same time that more of the burden's been shifting to them," says Bob Carlson, author of the book "The New Rules of Retirement," and editor of a national newsletter, Retirement Watch.

It's more difficult to save, Carlson said, because health care and housing costs have risen and the 1990s bull market for stock growth is over. And the burden for saving has shifted because traditional pensions are drying up, and Social Security covers less of your pre-retirement income the more money you make.

But retirement specialists like Jantzen and Carlson insist it is possible to build toward a comfortable post-work future.