Just listed: A three bedroom refrigerator box

We spend a great deal of our time here talking about (and hopefully helping with) succession and transition for CPA firm owners and principals.

I won’t regale you or, for that matter, bore you time and again with the grim statistics of how many – or more accurately, how few – CPA firms have formal succession plans in place, but for those unfamiliar with the numbers, let’s just say they’re about two levels above eye-opening.

Recently however, I came across an interesting and another rather depressing study along sort of the same lines – retirement savings, or again lack thereof.

An industry acquaintance of mine who works in the banking field, once confided to me that CPAs as a rule are terrible savers, basically inept at planning their own retirement, primarily relying on either their capital account or their buyout in the event of a merger.

He revealed that some firm owners are so overleveraged with a crushing debt load that many didn’t have $10k in savings according to their applications for financing or additional capital.

Heck, even I have that.

But that stunning revelation is a microcosm of the retirement savings climate in general, as a new report from the Federal Reserve found that nearly one-third of American households have no savings or pensions awaiting them down the road, including nearly 20 percent of those ages 55 to 64 – the “back nine” of pending retirement so to speak.

Even more startling was the fact that nearly half of adults were not “actively thinking” about financial planning for retirement, with 24 percent saying they had given only little thought to financial planning for their retirement and another 25 percent saying they had done no planning at all. Some 25 percent said they didn’t know how they will pay their expenses in retirement.

Ahem, with all due respect, I think it’s time to wake up and face North folks. Social Security is not going to do it, provided of course there’s anything left in the trough when you’re ready to step down.

Although my list of top-flight actions and past decisions is admittedly rather limited, one of the smartest things I did was agree to let a well-respected money manager handle my retirement plan with one simple marching order – that when I stopped working I did not want to be living under a bridge in a used refrigerator box hunting squirrel for dinner.

With so much free information on retirement savings and easy-to-implement strategies on the Internet and appearing almost daily in newspaper columns and magazines, there should be little or no excuse for the above-cited survey findings.

Because from what I hear, there are just so many ways to prepare squirrel.