PETER D’ARRUDA: “But then we get to the transition phase when we’re within five years or so of retirement. I call it the financial red zone because now is the time when you need to protect what you have, you need to start transitioning away from the risk of Wall Street and into safe places that guarantee lifetime income.”

Pete D’Arruda has a simple way of deciding how much of your retirement savings should be at risk. He says, take your age and put a percentage after it. That is the percentage of your retirement savings that should be fully protected from losing value. So, for a sixty-five-year-old, the rule works like this:

PETER D’ARRUDA: “Sixty-five percent of the money must be in a place that can’t lose it. The reason why is when you’re in retirement it’s impossible to get the money back that you lost because you don’t have a salary coming in, so time is no longer on your side.”

The investment services company Charles Schwab prepares studies about Americans’ retirement planning. The company’s Retirement Pulse Survey looks at how people of all ages prepare for the big event.

One recent survey found that forty-four percent of baby boomers feel secure in their readiness for retirement. Baby boomers are the generation of Americans born in the years immediately after World War Two. The first baby boomers are now reaching sixty-five, currently the full retirement age in the United States.