Yet many investors, even those without traditional pensions, still reach retirement with only the vaguest notion of how to switch from accumulating assets to tapping them to finance their usual standard of living.
This view is supported by an Institute of Actuaries analysis, which concludes that means-testing leads to people who reach retirement with small savings having to pay high marginal tax rates.
"To be sure," he said, "an added few years on the job may enable some workers to reach retirement with reasonable security and dignity, but if we hinder competitive progress, we will almost certainly slow overall economic growth and keep frozen in place younger workers whose opportunities to secure jobs with better long-term prospects diminish with time".
This generation has now reached retirement with greater wealth than at any time in history, and is at the age of most intensive use of NHS services for tinnitus (Fig. 3).
However, the discipline is experiencing an outflux of senior systems engineers reaching retirement age with no ready source of systems engineers available to replace them, at a time when the demand for systems engineers is increasing (NDIA, 2010).
This phenomenon is likely to become more common as the number of people reaching retirement age swells, with many having dutifully followed the advice year in and year out to sock away as much tax-deferred income as possible.
Retired people and those reaching retirement age before April 2016, with broken career records, are being urged to take advantage of a "window of opportunity" to top up their state pension.
Spending on benefits paid specifically to pensioners accounted for just 5% of total spending in 1953-54, but is on course to account for 14% by 2017-18, as the numbers over the state pension age has increased and those reaching retirement have done so with greater entitlements to state pensions.
"With baby boomers reaching retirement age at a rate of 10,000 a day," she notes, "the number of lonely Americans will surely spike".
