I beg a thousand pardons for screwing up your video game, Your Excellency. I don’t know to which Munnell you refer. (See, I even avoided ending the sentence with a preposition for you, I don’t do that for everybody, you know.)
Alicia Munnell
a recent paper from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College titled "How much to save for a secure retirement," relies on that 80 percent figure. "Households with earnings of $50,000 and over needed about 80 percent of pre-retirement earnings to maintain the same level of consumption," writes Alicia Munnell, author of the study.
But wait, there's more
Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, admits she has yanked money out of her 401(k) to pay for big purchases, such as a child's honeymoon. "Whenever the kids needed something, I would take money out," says the 66-year-old management professor. "I'm supposed to be smart and savvy because I work in this area and I know all the pitfalls, but I've done a very bad job."
Another personal finance sin Munnell confesses to: In the mid-'90s, at age 50, she elected to begin taking around $2,500 in a monthly pension from the Boston Federal Reserve, where she'd worked for 20 years. "I didn't do anything smart with the money. I spent it."
Munnell is an advocate for maintaining Social Security benefits as they stand now, given that both the federal program and employer-sponsored plans aren't providing enough retirement income. She concedes, though, that "there's no free lunch." People will have to work a lot longer now, she says, as described in her 2008 book, Working Longer: The Solution to the Retirement Income Challenge, or face a much lower standard of living in retirement. "The only alternative is to save more," something she's trying to do.""
For to be.