Book excerpt: Many new retirement-related opportunities and risks confront individuals and employers in the 21st century. Opportunities include the exciting prospects of living longer, living healthier, and living a more productive life than ever before. But the risks are also huge, including the challenge of setting an income goal and then saving enough for retirement, investing wisely in a time of financial turmoil, and planning carefully for a long period of time in retirement. What are retirement needs and how much will we need to save for old age? What is retirement becoming, especially in an era of downsizing and early retirement? What assets should we hold prior to and throughout the retirement period? How should we invest our pension assets, and how can education influence 401(k) plan saving? How important are employer-provided pensions and social security in protecting retirees against old-age poverty? And what special problems do minorities and women face? Forecasting Retirement Needs and Retirement Wealth draws on the latest information available on health, wealth, and retirement in America, to offer new perspectives on ways to support the expanding population of older citizens. As these novel paths to retirement emerge, paths that involve "bridge" jobs and gradual transitions through various states of employment, they force new thinking on the concept and process of retirement. Contributors explore the difficult problem of determining what resources people need during retirement and offer ways to think about how much to save for old age.Also in the Pension Research Council Publications series-- Prospects for Social Security Reform Edited by Olivia S. Mitchell, Robert J. Myers, and Howard Young ISBN 0-8122-3479-0 / Cloth Living with Defined Contribution Pensions Remaking Responsibility for Retirement Edited by Olivia S. Mitchell and Sylvester J. Schieber ISBN 0-8122-3439-1 / Cloth Positioning Pensions for the Twentieth-First Century Edited by Michael S. Gordon, Olivia S. Mitchell, and Marc M. Twinney ISBN 0-8122-3391-3 / Cloth