The Coming Retirement "Crisis"

From Forbes.com

...America is facing a retirement crisis. Picture a scenario where most people hit age 60 or 65 and have no choice but to keep working, asking to stay on in their current jobs; or if pushed into "retirement," forced to find a new, lower-paying job at an age when many will be unemployable.

At the rate we're going, this could become the unfortunate fate for a frightening number of today's workers. It presents a big problem for the country and for the people that work in its companies. Now is the time to tackle it.

How did we get into this mess? It's simple: Think of retirement funding as a three-legged stool, in which needed savings comes from the workplace, the government and from personal savings.

While the balance of the article is really a call to action to small businesses to implement and grow their 401k plans for their employees, the above paragraphs do a good job of driving home a number of relevant points for those in their 30's, 40's, and 50's.

First, retirement of tomorrow is going to be very different than our parent's retirement. I think we all know that. Second, the issue of retirement is something that we should factor into our career path. No this doesn't mean we all have to go work for GM, IBM or some other large company with perceived big retirement benefits. Instead it means that we do a realistic assessment of our skills and what we like to do and how those will pay in 20-30 years. A working retirement might be your ideal retirement (regardless of the economics) but only if you are able to do something that you enjoy doing. But skills/knowledge/connections don't happen over night. In short, the same way that you might allocate today's money for your retirement in the form of a 401k or IRA, you might want to allocate a small amount of time in your week to learning a skill that you plan to use in retirement.