With Americans living longer and stretching their retirement over more years, it is even more important to save up for your sixties and seventies.

"When we hear the word retired, another way of thinking of that from a financial planning prospective, is that you are unemployed for twenty or thirty years," said KTRH financial analyst Pat Shinn.

He says social security, pensions and individual retirement accounts can last that long, but only if you lay the groundwork decades in advance.