The irony for Baby Boomers is that even though you will be living longer than your parents or your grandparents, most of you expect to delay retirement longer than your parents or grandparents. This is a follow on effect from the reduced nest egg that was going to keep your retirement income at a level to give you the lifestyle you had dreamed of. The current economic crisis has caused many Baby Boomers to have to plan to work past their retirement date or scale down their retirement expectations.

What once looked like a sufficient retirement nest egg for travelling the world and building their new easy care retirement homes, might not even maintain their existing or even a restricted lifestyle for the rest of their lives.

Baby boomers are better educated, with higher incomes and longer life expectancies than the generations that preceded them. They also have fewer children and may not be married, leaving them with fewer options if they need help in their old age. People have been retiring at increasingly younger ages since the growth of superannuation and Social Security pensions began more than fifty years ago. However, the retirement trend appears to be reversing. The majority of men and a greater percentage of women over fifty five are still in the work force and experts believe it will increase even more as the oldest Baby Boomers reach sixty five.

People are living longer and leading more active lives and that increased longevity has been one of the crowning achievements of the last century, but is has to be financed somehow. Some will continue working by choice and many of those nearing retirement age may gradually reduce their workload rather than abruptly stop. Others may have to stay on the job full time to replenish their diminished retirement nest egg.

Many of the Baby Boomers have put off retirement because of the effect of the financial crisis on their long-term savings and some of them think they can recoup the losses by working on in their job an additional year or two, but can they?

Are you looking at retirement with a larger amount of debt than you would like, including home equity lines of credit, partly paid off mortgages, credit card debt and personal loans. For the last few years, there has been extraordinary asset growth and low interest rates, and that combination allowed people to increase their net worth easily and significantly, and that in turn made their expectation of paying off debts to be a simple matter.

If you are among those planning their retirement but are concerned about your level of debt, whether it is still an amount owing on the mortgage or in other categories of debt, it is time to take some definite steps to make some mindset and lifestyle changes. Remind yourself from time to time, that paying a mortgage and trying to pay off debts at the same time, while living on a fixed income isn't a whole lot of fun. For a pampered Baby Boomer, this is one of the most difficult things to do

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