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Only 17% of workers (and 32% of current retirees) are very confident they will have enough money to live comfortably throughout their retirement, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute's (EBRI) 2018 Retirement Confidence Survey. What's worse is that only 38% of retirees are very confident they will have enough money to take care of basic expenses during retirement.
(Related: Don't Leave Your Children Any Money)
If your client's retirement plan doesn't include guaranteed lifetime income to cover basic expenses, your client is basically rolling the dice. Only about 12% of workers are very confident that they know how much income they will need each month in retirement, or how to even withdraw that income. So, how do Americans plan for their retirements if they don't even know how to determine the amount of money they'll need to pay for those basic everyday expenses?
Financial advisors, however, play a key role in helping Americans prepare for just that. By helping their clients determine how much income they'll need in retirement, and looking at guaranteed lifetime income to cover that amount, people like you can help make the retirement income planning process much less daunting for their clients.
To put this need for protected income into context, we can look back at Japan in the 1980s: Honda and Toyota were the top Japanese stocks and the Japanese Stock market was hitting new highs, almost daily, for a decade. Then, the stock market plunged, and it stayed down for over 30 years. It's likely that many Japanese soon-to-be or current retirees were facing much less liquidity than they had anticipated after that market drop. With protected lifetime income, they would've been able to protect themselves and their necessary expenses from unexpected changes in the market.
om Hegna is a senior education advisor for the Alliance for Lifetime Income. He's the author of 
