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SALT LAKE CITY -- Will you be able to afford to retire comfortably? A lot more people are shaking their heads.
More than one in four surveyed by the employee research institute said no -- a big jump from the year before.
KSL spoke to a financial planner who draws a picture that's not quite so dire.
"There's no reason you have to be pessimistic," said Carl Richards, a certified financial planner and contributor to the New York Times. "That's a choice."
Take, for example, Celeste Kennard. Once if you would've asked if Kennard and her husband would be able to afford to retire, she wasn't so sure.
"I'd say I hope so," Kennard said with a laugh.
In order to get there, they needed a plan.
After the Kennards racked up a lot of credit card debt, they enrolled in a personal finance course called the Financial Peace University offered through Zions Bank. They began mapping out their financial future.
"We didn't have any idea what reality would be," Kennard said.
"Often we underestimate what we'll actually need in the future," Richards said.
"To be the same as right now, to have exactly the same income we have as right now, it would be just over $2 million," Kennard said.
"Financial planning is really all about tradeoffs, trying to balance our goals and our dreams with this set of finite resources," Richards tells students in his financial planning course. "The goal is to be able to figure out that overlap."
See what size nest egg you'll need to supplement income from pensions and Social Security with the CNNMoney retirement calculator.
Richards says people facing retirement today are looking at things differently.
"People are starting to ask questions they've never asked before," he said. "I mean, they're starting to ask, 'What do I really want?' What do I really need?'"
"When you get hit in the face with that reality, it's actually really good sometimes because your realize what the problem is," Kennard said.
The economic downturn of the last few years has been "a huge wake-up call for a lot of us," Richards says.
Richards, himself, had to work through his own major setback and wake-up call. He took on a mortgage too big, lived beyond his means and lost his house. In an article for The New York Times, he confessed he should have known better.
"Frankly, we can sit around and whine about it, or we can take responsibility, learn from those mistakes and start taking steps to improve things," he said.
Richards, the financial planner, hired a financial planner.
"It has completely changed my life, which sounds crazy because I am a planner," he said.
As for the Kennards, they learned how to invest and bulked up their savings. Ask Celeste Kennard now if she and her husband will meet their retirement goals --
"I'd say yeah," she said. "We'll be fine."
Email: blindsay@ksl.com
