To retire comfortably, it all boils down to time

— -- When Steve White began preparing to leave his medical practice in a small Georgia town 12 years ago, he and his wife, Charlotte, began searching for a reasonably priced retiree health care policy that would last until they qualified for Medicare.

They never quite found it. Today, the Whites, who are in good health, pay $12,000 for an annual policy with a $20,000 deductible. Steve White, who turns 65 next week, says he knows people in affluent Hilton Head, S.C., where the Whites live, who can't afford to retire until Medicare kicks in at age 65, because private health care is prohibitively expensive.

"Health care premiums," White laments, "hold more people hostage from retirement than any other issue."

Everyone knows that wannabe retirees are in a bind today as they consider whether they have the financial security to make the leap. Shrinking nest eggs, nagging inflation, stagnant wages, vanishing pensions, dubious advice and runaway health care costs are among the obstacles that can block a retiree's escape route.

Despite the long odds, there are still people, such as the Whites, who have managed to liberate themselves from office cubicles, assembly lines and other workplaces. These are people whose paths to retirement weren't paved with stock options, gold-plated executive benefits or multigenerational wealth. Yet they somehow defied the threats that thwart the ability of so many middle-class people to save enough for retirement.

How did they do it? Most of them were habitual savers. They avoided or paid off debt. They invested early and often for retirement. When they needed to, some of them pursued a little extra paid work.

But many of them were also fortunate. They tended to enjoy traditional company pensions and, if they were really lucky, received employer-provided retiree health insurance, too.

Older workers are all too aware that the pension safety net has been unraveling as companies such as IBM, Fidelity Investments, Verizon and Hewlett-Packard have frozen or terminated their pension plans. According to Boston College's Center for Retirement Research, only 43% of workers from 25 to 65 in Corporate America still qualify for traditional employer-provided pensions.

The old-fashioned pension may eventually exist mainly in the government sector alone, where strong legal protections have kept such "defined-benefit" plans the norm in city halls, state capitals and federal offices around the country.

Roger Cook, 64, a retired state archeologist in Lincoln, Calif., and his wife, Rae, 56, an assistant office manager in the state attorney general's office, are taking full advantage of their state pension coverage. The couple didn't start saving for retirement until 15 years ago. But they always knew their fallback was his-and-her defined-benefit plans.

"It's a real boon to anybody to have a guaranteed amount of money that will be coming in every month," says Roger Cook, whose pension plan allowed him to retire at 59½.