World not coming to an end; you'll need more retirement money

By Dian Vujovich

If you were one of the I-don’t-know-how-many who have believed that theMayan’s had the inside scoop of when our world would end, sorry. Seems their calendar was off.

What that means, among other things, is if your retirement fund or savings accounts only have enough money in them to get you comfortably through December 21, 2012, well….better keep working.

According to LiveScience.com, new researchers are questioning the validity of the Mayan end of Earth date and reported that it could be something like 50 to 100 years off. Or, may have already happened.

Yes, people, we could all not be living on Earth right now. Which, given the state of affairs these days, wouldn’t surprise me at all.

According to a new book,” Calendars and Years 11: Astronomy and Time in Ancient and Medieval World” the conversion dates from Mayan to the modern Gregorian calendar might not be set in stone.

So if that’s the case, and you’ve been a believer in the world ending about 26 months from now, don’t start selling everything quite yet.

Just as calculations from the financial world that sold us all a bill a goods about how great self-directing our retirement monies into IRAs and 401k’s would be in creating a substantial nestegg for our golden years, so it appears were the calculations from those who said that the Mayan’s knew the day that the end of the Earth would happen on.

Calculating anything into the future is always best to take with not a pinch but a handful of salt. With so many unknown variables, even the well-educated and smarty-pants types don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow in life let alone in the financial market place.

But here’s what I know: Keep saving. Retirement costs can run much more than you think or even expect.