Finance

The bright side of selling a home in a down market is you get to seek your own bargain if you’re going to buy after you’re done. Closing a sale, however, can be teeth-grindingly slow if you don’t do everything right — and maybe even if you do.

A new survey by Sun Life Financial found that 92 percent of workers said they don’t know how much their health care will cost in retirement or vastly underestimate the amount.

The market bottom was just two years ago, so investors are still fearful of steep loses. They’re looking for more ways to guarantee that they can turn their savings into a steady income stream without totally handing over control of their money.

We haven’t saved enough, too many of us retire without financial security, and we may need to work longer to achieve it — assuming we can hang onto our jobs or find new ones. No wonder that workers and retirees are more pessimistic about their future prospects than they’ve been in years.

“It didn’t feel right to be back in until now,” said Richard Dukas, who heads a public relations firm in New York City. “I still don’t want to put all my money in the market, but I believe we’ve come through the worst of it.”

Many of us are like Bill Murray’s weatherman in the movie Groundhog Day, when it comes to managing our own money. We’re searching for a way to break through repeating the same financial mistakes and reckless habits.

“The situation is extremely serious because baby boomers have not saved very effectively for retirement and are still retiring too early,” said Olivia Mitchell, director of the Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement Research at the University of Pennsylvania.

It’s unusual to feel financially well prepared for retirement. That’s due partly to the poor performance of stocks over the past decade. But mostly it’s due to not socking enough money away.

It took guts and good planning to decide to retire in the middle of the deepest recession in decades. Even so, those who did felt flickers of self-doubt when the stock market crumbled around the time they banked their final paychecks.

Paul Skidmore’s office is shuttered, his job gone, his 18-month job search fruitless and his unemployment benefits exhausted. So at 63, he filed for Social Security benefits, three years earlier than planned.