Retirement Preparedness Quotes

One of the strongest lessons I learned in doing six months of work on retirement topic was how absolutely crucial the Social Security system is for the great mass of Americans. The research of professionals and our own reporting convinced me that many millions of people are not capable of effectively managing the finances for their own retirement.

Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control.

The retirement financial crisis will affect far more people than baby boomers, and certainly it will affect their children. Most of the retirees and near-retirees with whom we talked, said that they were extremely reluctant to have to depend on their children financially, or to think of moving in with their children. But the mere fact that they were discussing those issues indicates that some of them have already figured out that that is what lies ahead for them.

On aging societies, there is no reason why a country that has a lot of old people can't be prosperous if, during their working lives, individuals provide for their retirement.

Everyone's lost a lot of money on their 401k plans. I've heard some people calling them 201k plans. So it's even more important to get people to be saving more for retirement. Behavioral economics has helped us learn a lot about how to do that.

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 are going to see a tremendous number of health professionals retire over the next 8-10 years. We are not doing nearly enough to deal with this problem.

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

The prospect of penury in age is so gloomy and terrifying that every man who looks before him must resolve to avoid it; and it must be avoided generally by the science of sparing.

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.