Retirement Reboot: Commonsense Financial Strategies for Getting Back on TrackPaperback (2024)

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About the Author

Mark Miller is a journalist, author, and podcaster with a national reputation as a top expert on retirement and aging—and he is at a point in life when he personally is asking himself many of the same questions facing millions of other older Americans. He contributes regularly to the New York Times “Retiring” column, which appears in the Sunday edition, where they are among the best-read personal finance stories in the paper. He also writes monthly national columns on retirement for Reuters, Morningstar, and Wealth Management magazine. Mark’s website, RetirementRevised.com, publishes a newsletter and podcast that features interviews with authoritative experts in the field of retirement. His previous books include Jolt: Stories of Trauma and Transformation and The Hard Times Guide to Retirement Security. He is the father of three young adult children who still periodically seek out advice from him or his wife of forty years, Anita Weinberg.

Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

If you are getting close to retirement, the odds are pretty good that you’re not prepared.

I don’t mean getting prepared emotionally—although retirement is a significant life transition that can shake people up. I’m talking about the financial side of retirement. And the statistics tell us that two-thirds or more of Americans nearing retirement age simply are not ready.

The most important measure of financial readiness to retire is your ability to replace working income after you retire—in other words, your ability to maintain your standard of living. This readiness is directly related, of course, to the financial history of your working years: career earnings, time spent out of the workforce, and financial emergencies that flare up along the way. Competing demands for each available dollar, such as the high cost of housing, child care, and college tuition, also matter a great deal to your level of preparation for retirement. An unexpected crisis or life upheaval like a health emergency, divorce, or disability that prevents you from working, can throw your plans off track.

Americans approaching retirement now have surfed some especially scary economic waves. If you were 55 years old in 2021, you’ve experienced four recessions that might have left you unemployed for extended periods of time. Two of them were especially devastating for older workers: the Great Recession of 2009–10 and the pandemic-induced recession that began in 2020. Both of these downturns produced higher rates of job loss—and longer periods of joblessness—for older workers than for younger ones. Millions of homeowners lost their homes or found themselves deep underwater in the housing crash accompanying the Great Recession. We tend to have short memories in this country, but these economic calamities had long-lasting effects that were very difficult—if not impossible—to recover from.

Even a short-term interruption in wages can have a surprisingly large impact on retirement. Each year out of the workforce translates into losses considerably larger than the immediate amount of missing salary. These losses compound over the arc of a career—lost wage growth and retirement savings, and credits toward Social Security and pension benefits.

If you’ve been saving and investing for retirement—and that’s a big if—you have lived through eight stock market crashes or bear markets—nine if you’re a few years older and experienced the Black Monday crash of 1987.

You struggled with competing demands for dollars that might have been saved. For example, over the past two decades, average annual tuition and fees at private universities jumped 144 percent; in-state costs at public schools soared 212 percent. Nearly 10 million retirement-age households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, meaning that they fall into the category researchers call “cost burdened.” The share of older households carrying debt has soared over the past two decades, and bankruptcy rates are rising.

Roughly one-fourth of adults say they or a household member have had problems paying medical bills, and about half have put off or skipped health care or dental care in a typical year.

Perhaps you needed to quit your job to provide care for someone you love. One out of every five Americans are caregivers for an adult or child with special needs.

Meanwhile, wages have been growing slowly for most workers over the past four decades—and nearly all the wage growth that did occur was concentrated among the highest-income households. In fact, if we had not experienced wage growth during periods of very low unemployment in the late 1990s and just before the pandemic, real wages would be lower today than they were 40 years ago.

Many Americans are living with no financial reserves whatsoever—nearly 40 percent of adults say they could not cover a $400 emergency with cash, savings, or a credit card charge.

The COVID-19 pandemic has stretched the financial rubber band even tighter for millions—in many cases, past the breaking point.

The percentage of these at-risk households already was very high pre-pandemic across income groups, and it has jumped substantially since the coronavirus struck. Risk is highest for low-income households—but nearly as high for middle earners.

People of color face substantially higher risks—the result of our history of racism in the labor market evident in everything from hiring to pay, promotions, and benefits. These inequities have kept incomes much lower than for White counterparts. And numerous policies have served as barriers to wealth accumulation by Black people. These include the Jim Crow–era Black Codes, which restricted opportunity in many Southern states; racially restrictive covenants barred them from buying homes in White neighborhoods; and redlining practices that made mortgages hard or impossible to obtain. The inequities have compounded over time, as families were unable to transfer wealth to subsequent generations.

A majority of single Black and Latino retirees don’t have sufficient incomes to meet the basic cost of living. And women also face special risks. They tend to earn less than men, and they are more likely to take time off from work to care for children or elderly parents. Even brief career interruptions diminish wage growth, retirement savings, and Social Security benefits, which are determined by wage history. Women also tend to outlive men, needing to stretch resources over more years. In particular, they face higher health care expenses in retirement.

Taken together, we can see that many older Americans will have trouble maintaining their standard of living in retirement. One of the best measures of this risk is the Elder Index, produced by the Gerontology Institute at the Universityof Massachusetts Boston. It measures the cost of living for older people living as couples or alone—but independent of children. It is built around the typical budgets of seniors, and it shows that roughly half of Americans over age 65 living alone have incomes that are below the index. In other words, they lack the resources to pay for their basic living needs. For couples, who usually benefit from two Social Security checks and are more likely to have other income. the comparable figure is 23 percent. But the figures are far worse for people of color, and for women living alone, as the following chart shows.

Rates of Economic Insecurity by Racial Identity and Household Status, 65 Years or Older

Source: Data from Jan Mutchler, Nidya Velasco Roldán, and Yang Li. “Late-Life Gender Disparities in Economic Security in the Context of Geography, Race and Ethnicity, and Age: Evidence from the 2020 Elder Index.” Universityof Massachusetts Boston Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging Publications. June 2021.

If you’re not ready for retirement for any of the reasons I’ve described—and probably it’s more than one—this book is for you. Not because I have some magic formula to offer—I don’t. What I do have to offer is a short list of practical strategies that can improve your financial security in retirement. They are not necessarily easy, but they are achievable, sensible steps—and you still have time to take them.

These are the strategies that I’ve distilled from 15 years working as a journalist covering the retirement and aging beat. One of the best things about being a journalist is access. You can sit down with experts and get them to explain things to you and to teach you things. And, as a student of retirement, I have taken full advantage, interviewing many of the top experts in the field here in the United States and around the world. I estimate that I’ve produced nearly 1,000 articles and podcasts about retirement and conducted well over 3,300 interviews. I’ve read hundreds of research papers on everything from Social Security, Medicare, and other types of health insurance to late-career work, investing and saving, workplace retirement plans, pensions, taxes, financial planning, housing, careers, long-term care, and caregiving.

And here’s the most important thing I’ve learned: Complexity is the enemy of everyday working Americans trying to build toward a financially secure retirement.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword 1

By Chris Farrell, Senior Economics Contributor, Marketplace and Minnesota Public Radio

Introduction 7

Chapter 1 Making a Plan 19

If you don't have a financial plan for retirement, it's impossible to know where you stand.

Chapter 2 Timing Your Retirement 29

Timing is everything-and retirement is no exception.

Chapter 3 Optimizing Social Security 39

Social Security will be your most important source of retirement income, so it's important to understand how this benefit works, and how to get the most from it.

Chapter 4 Navigating Medicare 61

Health care is one of the most significant expenses in retirement, and making smart choices about your Medicare enrollment can help you manage these costs.

Chapter 5 Building Savings 91

If you're getting close to retirement and haven't saved much, it is still possible to build significant savings late in the game.

Chapter 6 Tapping Home Equity 113

If your retirement plan is coming up short, consider tapping what might be your most important asset: your home.

Chapter 7 Managing Your Career to the Finish Line 125

How to stay gainfully employed as long as you want to-or need to-before transitioning into retirement.

Chapter 8 Aging in Place 135

Most Americans hope to age right where they are. But it's important to evaluate your living situation for age-friendliness-whether that is your current borne and community or somewhere else.

Chapter 9 Managing Long-Term Care Risk 143

Contemplating a time when you might not be able to take care of your own daily living needs is difficult-but necessary.

Chapter 10 The Value of Advice 161

Financial planning help once was the province of the wealthy, but over the past couple decades, it has become more accessible to average folks-and it has become far more professional and holistic in approach.

Chapter 11 Taxes in Retirement 173

Your tax burden will likely he lighter in retirement, but you may be able to smooth out or minimize the burden.

Chapter 12 Managing Your Pension 181

Traditional pensions are waning in the private sector, but if you're lucky enough to have one coming, it's important to manage it well and make smart decisions.

Chapter 13 Becoming an Entrepreneur After 50 199

The word may sound intimidating, but entrepreneurship later in your career can be a great way to keep working.

Chapter 14 Finding Your Purpose in Retirement 209

Whether you work as a volunteer or part-time for pay, using some of your time in retirement this way pays big dividends for your own health and mental well-being.

Chapter 15 Toward a New Social Insurance Era 221

There is good reason to worry about the American retirement system as it is today, but we can improve it by strengthening and expanding our two most critical social insurance programs for retirement: Social Security and Medicare.

Acknowledgments 253

Notes 257

Index 266