Stock losses take big toll on retirement savings

For some Americans, the solution is to delay the retirement party.

Twenty-nine percent of people in their late 60s were working in 2006, up from 18 percent in 1985, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the next decade, the number of workers who are 55 and older is expected to increase at more than five times the rate of the overall work force, the BLS reported.

Cherie Miller, 55, of Crawfordville, Fla., retired a month ago after 35 years in a secretarial job at Florida State University. But she will start a new job next week, working in an elementary school cafeteria, to make ends meet.

Her pension pays about $1,200 a month. But because she's too young for Medicare, and because her husband Robert, 57, is a self-employed golf course equipment repairman, she needs to spend about $1,100 monthly for health insurance.

"That insurance is so high that I'm going to have to continue to work just so I have insurance," she said. "And just the way the stock market is going right now, it's kind of scary."

Miller's pension is split about evenly between a money market account and a conservative fund made up mostly of bonds.

Bryan Hancock, a certified financial planner in Birmingham, Ala., said if investors have a well thought-out investment plan, they shouldn't need a sudden change of course. People who are close to retirement should avoid heavy investments in stocks, he said.

As a result, many advisers say investors may want to revisit their portfolio allocation — the mix of stocks and bonds — to assess if it's appropriate for their risk tolerance and the number of years left to retirement.

For 65-year-old John Howe, everything has been called into question.

"Oh, my God, I'm going to have to work until they put me in the hole!'" said Howe, 65, of Kingsville, Texas, joking about the market's historic drop earlier this week.

He had planned to retire in less than a year from his job as chief operating officer of a shipping and storage container company. But Howe and his wife, Linda, a retired teacher, now have reason to question their goal of building a home in Austin.

"The jury's still out," Howe said. "If the market doesn't recover in a year, a year and a half, and our rollovers and IRAs and so on stay down, then that'll be a problem."

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