Over the last 100 hundred years the average retirement age has dropped greatly.

In 1910 most people never lived long enough to retire. On average people worked 54 yrs and retired 7 yrs. By 1940 that had changed to working 50 yrs and being retired for 10. In 1970 that dropped to working 45 yrs and being retired for 13. In 2000, the numbers dropped to working 42 yrs and being retired for 18.
The reality is that the standard of living has to drop and people need to lose that sense of entitlement. All of those necessary items aren't really that necessary (i.e. BMWs, 2&3 car garages, 4+ bedrooms, etc.).
I do believe there will be problems where people want to and need to work but where will they be working?
The other HUGE problem in society and especially for retirement is health. Until that is resolved you never know how much money is sufficient for retirement.

My thoughts on telling people the truth about the financial reality are simple: The financial planners were a step behind reality and ruined a lot of people's retirement but not mine which I will pontificate on later.

I'm speaking about the plight of the middle class not the rich or the poor. We should remember that pensions, retirements and a large middle class have only existed from the 50's to the end of the 80's.

I'm 53, my grandparents only had a tiny Social Security pension, lived with one of their children and they had no savings.

My parents' generation were the exception. They retired with all three legs of the savings stool - pension, social security and modest savings. The modest savings leg is what financial planners used to advise on. Even if they screwed up the savings royally, the two major legs of the stool survived and the retiree was still in decent shape.

The 90's ushered in downsizing and the loss of job security. Those that kept a job saw 401k's rather than defined pension plans become the norm. Most of my generation (including me) that made it to the fabled defined pension took it in a lump sum (whenever it was offered) because we did not trust the corporations anymore. Plus, with buyouts, many of us retired in our 50's which meant that social security was over 10 years away.

Suddenly, the financial planners were advising retirees and near retirees on savings which now included their pension in the form of 401k's and lump sums. Since Social Security was years off, there were no other legs on the retirement stool. Many people were 100% reliant on their investments for their retirement.

The one-two punch from the dot com bust of 2000-2002 and the current financial meltdown coupled with a long recession with high unemployment makes your reader's prediction that most people will never be able recover from this fiasco to be true.

And let's not forget how this colossal financial meltdown happened. The great depression gave us The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the United States and included banking reforms, some of which were designed to control speculation.

Many of those provisions in the Glass-Steagall Act were repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and that alllowed the financial meltdown fueled by CDOs/CDS and derivatives that were built on shoddy loans. So our government allowed unregulated greed to create a huge bubble which burst last year.

When I started saving, the rule of thumb was not have to stock, bonds or mutual investments that you could NOT afford to lose. The financial planners got greedy, changed that maxim and now the middle class has to pay.

The bottom line is that this one leg stool of savings that the financial planners have destroyed for so many middle class retirees/near retirees has only existed for 15 to 20 years and that is not nearly enough time to come up with accurate models.

The reason my wife and I were not ruined was that when I took my early buyout at the end of 2003, we laddered my 401k and lump sum into IRA/CDs and that ladder is now 10 years (2019) long and paying us 4.81%. Thus, after five years, instead of losing 25% to 50% of our IRA we are up 23%.

We don't plan to touch the IRA for 10 to 15 years. We never bought a McMansion or an SUV and we've owned our 1500 sq ft rancher outright since 1993. We have no debt and currently live on our non-IRA savings which are also laddered in CDs or in ibonds.

In summary, we did what most middle class folks did not. We lived frugally, saved, incurred no debt and made sure our retirement IRAs had no risk. According to the last administration ,we were not patriotic because we did not go into debt and consume like a tapeworm. I prefer, however, to see my wife and I as happy ants listening to the lamentations of grasshoppers.

Here are some comments sent via email from Pedro:
At the end of your article entitled “’70 is new 65’ as more defer retiring” you solicited comments. There is much that I could write about my views on the general topic of retirement but I know you are very busy. Therefore, I will be very brief. First, wants and needs are two different and in many ways opposing concepts, but people are blurring the distinction between these two concepts. Such blurring is affecting how people prioritize their pre-retirement spending and, thus, affecting how they allocate funds for retirement. For those whose incomes allow for choices I am not saying that they should not fulfill their wants, as long as they fully realize what they are doing could negatively impact how they live in retirement.

The blurring of the concepts of wants and needs also can affect how people envision their retirement. In your article you quote a reader who used the words “retire comfortably”. The problem with these words is that what they mean to people is very individualized depending on their concepts of wants and needs. I recommend that people who are hard pressed think about retire comfortably as having needs met. Then they should specifically define what their real needs are. It would be great if in retirement some wants could also be fulfilled. But when considering delaying retirement for even a few years in order to save for wants, people need to remember that no one is promised they will be alive or in good health past age 65.

Perhaps when deciding if they have enough money to retire people should read the recent Jay Hancock article regarding the relation of material fulfillment to happiness. Happiness is a state of mind, and people that at least have their real needs met can be happy. I love the quote in the article from Albert Einstein. Maybe thinking how to be happy and about what really counts without having to fulfill a lot of material wants can help people appropriately prioritize spending pre-retirement, as well as lead more satisfying lives both pre and post retirement.