Hedrick Smith Quotes

Your children are your retirement plan. Because of that, all parents want their children, their only children, to do really well financially, so that they can essentially take care of their parents when they are older.

Economically anxious, many parents see their children's accomplishments as a sort of insurance against the financial challenges of old age; high-achieving kids, this logic goes, will become high-earning adults and therefore be better able to help Mom and Dad pay for the assisted-living facility in a few decades.

There is no question that policy makers, corporate leaders, pension consultants, and journalists too have to get out into the real world to at least see the pain of retirement woes before they start to prescribe policies and solutions.

Someone said to me the other day: "Well, you're eventually going to live until 110." And I said: "Well, who's going to keep me? What age do I retire? 100?" How are you going to live all those years and who is going to keep you doing it? I have a couple of grandchildren now so I'm banking on them.

One of the difficulties in getting to the bottom of the poor prospects for retirement is that the policy and intellectual elites, including corporate leadership, who are dealing with this problem, rarely have the same difficulties as the great majority of middle-income Americans.

We're just not ready for the retirement of the Baby Boomers. And we'd better prepare for that.

A lot of people aren't saving enough. And incidentally, people are living longer now, and health care is improving. You might end up retired for 30 years - people are not really preparing for that.

The children of baby boomers should take very seriously the consequences for them of the inadequate funding for them of the baby boomer generation. This is a huge economic problem for the nation, not just for individuals or individual families. Think about it for a minute - if retirees become 20% of our population and their purchasing power falls below what has been normal for retirees in the past, one important engine driving our economy will be diminished.

You can imagine, if somebody's approaching retirement, and all of a sudden the funds that he or she is depending on is depleted by 50% or however many, it gives them a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach.

For the baby boomer generation, a home is now seen not as the cornerstone of advancement but a ball and chain, restricting their ability and their mobility to move and seek out a job at another location.

The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.

Invest in people who will take care of you when you're old.

People think retiring is fun. Well, maybe, but if you have a certain kind of fire inside, there is no end in sight.

On the other end of the spectrum, these women who do live long enough to collect Social Security face the challenge of being disproportionately dependent on the Social Security system for retirement income.

Today there are about 40 million retirees receiving benefits; by the time all the baby boomers have retired, there will be more than 72 million retirees drawing Social Security benefits.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I'll have a window with a view.

As the baby boomers like me are retiring and getting ready to retire, they will spend whatever it takes - and they're the wealthiest generation in our country - to make themselves live an enjoyable life in their retirement years.

Social Security is the very foundation of retirement security for millions of Americans.

Our nation's Social Security Trust Fund is depleting at an alarming rate, and failure to implement immediate reforms endangers the ability of Americans to plan for their retirement with the options and certainty they deserve.

I really wanted to retire and rest and spend more time with my children, my grandchildren and of course with my wife.

Bonds as an asset class will always be needed, and not just by insurance companies and pension funds but by aging boomers.

My dad loves what I do and I support my parents financially because they didn't have a job that gave them a pension.

People retire to do what I do every day.

Our country also hungers for leadership to ensure the long-term survival of our Social Security system. With 70 million baby boomers in this country on the verge of retirement, we need to take action to shore up the system.

Our society has changed in unforeseeable ways since Social Security was created. For example, we are living longer, healthier, and more productive lives and while this is all great news, this has also placed added pressure on America's retirement system.