"Retirement postponement syndrome" can play havoc with post-work lifestyles. Somebody had to come up with a name for it. The tendency among many Americans to put off retirement planning has been dubbed the "retirement postponement syndrome," or RPS, by members of the advisory-firm network Zero Alpha Group (ZAG) who presented their ideas at web-carried media event earlier this month.

"Most people know the basic formula" -- time, rate of return, and amount of money saved or invested -- "when it comes to saving and investing for retirement," Scott Sarber of Kennewick, Wash.-based ZAG member Peter Hastings Investment Management says in the webcast. "[These] three factors are subject to a host of pressures, competing priorities and other considerations that can spell the difference between success and failure in building a retirement nest egg."

Wishful

The "competing priorities" that distract people from retirement planning include betting too heavily on inherently unsure things such as the sale of a small business or home, the often ruinous expense of children's college tuition to adults already in their late forties and fifties, the assumption that one's cost of living will magically decline in retirement, failing to account for the medical expenses of aged parents and the tendency to continue supporting feckless children well into adulthood.

"What we are calling "RPS" is a little-understood financial malady that can stand between unwary investors and a comfortable retirement that gets started on schedule," says Glenn Kautt, president of the Monitor Group, a McLean, Va-based member of ZAG. "Two of the five problem areas that we are highlighting are the following: people betting too heavily on inherently unsure things (such as the sale of a small business or home); and parents in their late 40s and into their 50s who are unprepared for costly college tuition for late- arriving children, often in the context of a 'second family' arising from remarriage."

The Zero Alpha Group is a 12-year-old network of nine independent investment advisories, which between them manage or advise on something like $7 billion in assets. -FWR

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