Closeup of older person putting money in jar

Most Americans understand very little about retirement planning and lack essential information to make the right moves, according to survey results released this week by MoneyRates.com. 

The personal finance website polled 1,000 Americans who are either within 20 years of retirement age or already have reached it. The results do not bode well for long-term care financial planning: Roughly two-thirds of respondents said they don’t know how much they should save for retirement or how much they could afford to spend.

Further, most respondents indicated that they do not have a retirement budget. Approximately 55% said they hadn’t yet formulated a monthly budget for what they could afford to spend in retirement. In addition, about one in four said they expect that their retirement savings would last less than five years.

“Even when responses were broken down to just people who are already retired, nearly half indicated that they do not have a spending budget,” said Richard Barrington, MoneyRates’ senior financial analyst and author of the survey. “That’s a lot of people who are not in control of how long their retirement savings will last.”