Does Your Retirement Fund Look Shaky?

Feeling shaky about your retirement future? Count yourself part of a large, jumpy crowd. Only a quarter (27 percent) of people age 40 and older are very confident that they and their spouse will have enough money to live comfortably throughout retirement. A whopping three-quarters of us are struggling on a day-to-day basis to scare up enough resources to fund even a modest level of comfort.

A solid retirement is based on four parts: Social Security, pension benefits and personal savings, earnings from work past the traditional retirement age and health care benefits.

Credited with keeping nearly on-half of older Americans out of poverty, Social Security remain our most valuable and reliable source of retirement income. Those benefits alone, however, cannot provide years free of financial worries.

The other two sources of retirement income - pension and savings - have deteriorated, while spiraling costs threaten the stability of retiree health plans and the solvency of Medicare and Medicaid.

Traditional employer-based pension plans are down sharply, with only one in five American workers looking forward to a regular retirement check. Folks on the job are more likely to be offered the opportunity to save in an employee-sponsored 401(k) plan or a similar vehicle based on voluntary participation. But half of all private-sector employees either don't have access to that solution or aren't using it.

Personal savings are headed the same way. More than half of workers who have saved for retirement have put away less than $25,000. With national personal savings hovering around half of a percent of income, we are not saving enough.

Why don't we save more? Because it's too hard and because we have too much debt.