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August 29, 2007 at 08:00 PM
A new study on retirement readiness suggests that most pre-retirees seriously underestimate the number of years they will be retired and thus the amount of savings they will need to last them through those years. For example, the average pre-retiree believes he will need to make his retirement savings last until age 83. However, a healthy 65 year-old man living today has a 24% chance of living to at least age 90, while a healthy woman of the same age has a 35% chance of living until 90.
As a result, a “guaranteed income gap” will be faced by those people in retirement, as guaranteed income sources replace less and less of their pre-retirement income. The study, conducted by the Fidelity Research Institute and written by the Institute’s Van Harlow and professor Moshe Milevsky of York University, forecasts that those guaranteed income sources, like Social Security and pensions, will replace less than 30% of the average pre-retiree’s income by the 2030s, compared to the current 39% replacement rate.
The challenge for consumers and their advisors is to plan for retirement knowing that they will have “a much smaller [safety] net to catch them if they make a planning mistake,” notes Harlow. The report, Structuring Income for Retirement, then assesses three different income-generating vehicles and their place in the retirement portfolio, and using a “retirement sustainability quotient,” proposes five guidelines for building a “sustainable” retirement portfolio:
1. Retirement income plans should not only consider asset allocation but also income products that can offer longevity insurance, inflation hedging, and assured
payment streams.
2. When income products are being considered, investors should clearly understand
that there are trade-offs between guaranteed lifelong income and inflation
protection versus such values as investment control, liquidity, fees, and costs and
the potential size of bequests to heirs.
3. Those who have sufficient assets to sustain retirement incomes at very low rates of
withdrawals may find that the additional longevity insurance they might gain by
