Retirement planning is something that everyone should do, but baby boomers in particular need to look long and hard at their retirement investments, or find themselves having to put off retirement for several years because they just don’t have enough money. This is more likely if you are still supporting your children through university while at the same time providing health support for aged parents.

We tend to jog along complacently as far as our retirement investment plans go, thinking that our cost of living will go down once we retire, but this may not be so. We still need to eat the same amount. Our utilities will still cost the same - or more if the price goes up as it is quite likely to. And then we have all that time on our hands that we want to fill with travel or other hobbies. We can’t do that for nothing.

Travel costs money and so do hobbies. And it would be a shame to have to miss out on doing something that you’ve been looking forward to for many years simply because you still don’t have enough money. But with a little more foresight and attention to financial affairs, that need not be the case. Baby boomers are the ones who have traditionally worked the hardest and helped their families get educated, all the while helping out their aged parents either financially or physically.

This has led them to lead a frugal kind of life and they may be looking forward to reversing that a little in their retirement. The bad new is that they may have to tighten their purse strings even more. In fact, baby boomers need to analyse their situation carefully, testing everything to see what they can expect to get and what they are likely to need.

Baby boomers no longer have all the criteria needed to gain wealth through investments. Retirement planning needs three things to be successful; time, rate of return and money saved. But baby boomers no longer have the luxury of time. Therefore they need to get the highest rate of return for the money they have saved that they can, without being exposed to too much risk. If they cannot get a good enough return, then they face the probability that their retirement will not be as they have dreamt and that a life of frugality will extend into the future.