The best time to start planning for it, experts say, is the day you go to work. However, these same experts will concede, almost no one does that. Instead, most Americans wait until middle age or beyond to start taking a serious look at what their lives are going to be like in retirement and all the decisions they need to make before they take their gold watch and head for the door. The second takes a lot of soul-searching.
Retirement means different things to different people.
But the decisions ultimately are yours, and with many of them there is no going back. No matter what your age, today is not too early or too late to start gathering information and thinking about decisions you'll have to make. The earlier the better, of course, but the increasing dependence on defined contribution pension plans, those in which the employee makes the investment decisions and bears the consequences, make early planning even more important than in the past. You don't want to end up making a lot of key choices in the last 30 or 60 days. Traditional company-managed pension plans are not as common as they once were, but millions of workers are still covered by them.