[natickdan]

I retired at 53 a couple of years ago after a 30 year career with the same corporation. My wife will be retiring next month at age 55 with a small local government pension. My wife is also a Justice of Peace and she will continue performing marriage ceremonies while we are here in MA. This, we hope, will help supplement our retirement income.

We worked hard and saved even harder to put ourselves in a position to retire. We married at age 20 and started our family the next year. We have been fortunate to have gotten our three children through college debt free. As a young couple, like most young families, we struggled financially for many years, but we never stopped contributing to our 401K retirement funds - even when we thought we couldn't afford to do so.

No retirement plan is perfect, but even an imperfect plan is better than no plan at all. Unfortunately, there are so many people who are not financially prepared to retire and a large number of those people are in this position through no fault of their own.

The road map to retirement has changed quite a bit in just a few short years. Many companies no longer offer a defined pension plan and still many others no longer match 401K contributions. To that point, I worry about the ability of employees in this group to have the financial tools necessary to allow them to enjoy the same level of retirement many of us have been able to do. Time will tell!