Your choice: Save 1% of income for 30 years or retire just 3-6 months later

Waiting a few months has enormous perks no matter how much you make

You’re 49 years old, you make $113,000 a year and you’re starting to get worried about financing your retirement. You could take the drastic step of upping your retirement savings by 10 per cent of your salary. Or you could achieve the same result by retiring two years and five months later than you had been planning to.

This is one of a number of such comparisons in a remarkable new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “The Power of Working Longer,” that I imagine is going to become a staple of retirement advice in the coming years. The