Retirement Income Redesigned: Master Plans for Distribution: An Adviser's Guide for Funding Boomers' Best Years

FOREWORD

The Challenge of Retirement-Income Planning

The 76-million-strong baby-boom generation is slouching toward retirement. Indeed, the oldest boomers, the flower children of the '60s, are now entering their 60s. Couple this transition from the work-a-day world to retirement with the demise of traditional defined-benefit pensions and concerns about the viability of Social Security, and you would think that almost all who are retired or nearing retirement would be making earnest preparations to turn savings in 401(k)s and other accounts into an income that can support them the rest of their lives.

But they're not.

For example, when Fidelity Investments polled just over 1,500 recent retirees and workers within a year of retiring for its Retirement Transition Study two years ago, it found that 68 percent of the preretirees hadn't done a budget of their anticipated income and expenses in retirement, 74 percent hadn't set an asset allocation strategy for managing their retirement income, and 72 percent had not decided which sources to tap first for income once they retire. How many claimed they had done all these things? Just 12 percent.

I'd like to report that things have dramatically improved since then. Alas, the feedback I get from my Long View column in Money magazine, as well as the Ask the Expert column I write for AOL and the CNN Money website, tells me that's not the case. The process of generating a steady income from savings remains a hazy notion at best to most people.

And ...