The retirement crisis

I answer questions on a lot of topics related to savings and investments, but the ones that worry me most are the questions on retirement planning, specifically on post-retirement management of income and expenses. In fact, when I read the kind of questions that old people are asking about post-retirement income, I feel a kind of a panic. The reason is that when you are young and earning, most savings mistakes are fixable with some patience and maybe a little temporary discomfort. For senior citizens, it's sometimes too late to avert disaster. One major reason for these problems is the deep-rooted belief that the main issue in retirement savings is that one should be invested in 100 per cent 'safe' asset classes, essentially, fixed income deposits of one kind or another. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even