By Janet Bodnar
From Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
How would you respond if someone asked you what advice you would give your younger self to improve your financial situation in retirement?
In its Retiree Reflections Survey, the Employee Benefit Research Institute put that question to more than 1,000 retirees between the ages of 55 and 80. Even though the survey focused on middle-to-upper-income Americans, half of those responding said they would change their financial habits, mostly to save more or start earlier.
The open-ended responses included regrets about buying clothes instead of stocks, investing in a traditional IRA rather than a Roth IRA, and giving too much money to the kids. Many of those surveyed don’t have a formal financial plan for retirement, for which they cited a number of reasons: procrastination, unexpected events or lack of knowledge, to name a few….