It never ceases to amaze me that supposedly responsible people don't take responsibility for their retirement years. When I retire, my house will be fully paid off. There is no other debt I have to worry about. On top of that, I figure between my wife and myself, we'll have about $7000 a month in retirement income as well as medical coverage. But we planned for all of this.
Sometimes saints get stung. My folks had it all worked out, but then it turned out that the Bethlehem Steel retirement fund was invested entirely in Bethlehem Steel stock. When the company went south, it took the retirement fund with it.
The real problem nowadays is medical expenses. As technology improves, it becomes more and more possible to buy more life. It doesn't matter whether the cost is low or high: the appetite is infinite, so as long as the opportunity to buy more life is there, it will eventually eat up any amount of financial planning. And OK, a lot of people have insurance, and other people have a strong safety net, but somebody is footing the bill, and that somebody will complain that that geezer's life costs so damn much. (In this article, it just happens to be the geezers.) The only exceptions are the people who are very rich, and those who simply die before they get much in the way of pills and hospital time. Not too many years ago, almost everybody fell into one of those two categories.