Oct. 14--Through most of his working life, steelworker Ray West looked toward a secure retirement.

His company pension was expected to bring in around $30,000 a year, his union contract promised retiree health coverage and he had 401(k) savings of about $50,000.

Three years ago, it unraveled. His company filed for bankruptcy. The collapse reduced his expected pension to around $5,000 a year and canceled his retiree health insurance. And, in three years of unemployment since then, West of Hazel Park blew through the entire $50,000 in his 401(k) just getting by as he trained for a new career.

"I lost my job after 27 years before I got my retirement. I ain't going to get nothing," says West, 52.

Of all the threats to the American middle-class standard of living, from stagnating incomes to piles of consumer debt, perhaps the least understood and among the most serious is the looming crisis in retirement.

Several trends, each debilitating alone, are due to converge on the middle class over the next decade or so.

Traditional pension plans are disappearing in the private sector. Workers aren't saving enough in their voluntary 401(k) accounts. Longer life spans are stretching savings even thinner. Social Security remains under stress. All that was going on before retirement plans lost $2 trillion in the stock market dive.

Taken as a whole, the trends point toward a massive problem as people now in their 40s and 50s start to retire in 10 to 20 years.

Alicia Munnell, a professor of management and director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, has developed a retirement risk index that shows that 43% of households are in danger of not being able to maintain their living standard once they retire. She projects that risk to grow over time, and it gets worse for those lower down the income scale.

"A transition group is really going to suffer a lot until we say, 'Let's do something,' " Munnell says. "The early boomers and particularly the late boomers are going to have a terrible time." The baby boom is defined as people born between 1946 and 1964, a mass of Americans just reaching retirement age.

Of all the trends, perhaps the most worrisome is the failure of highly touted 401(k) private savings accounts to replace fast-disappearing traditional pensions. Not only do millions of workers not save enough, or like West drain their 401(k)s well ahead of retirement, but all the risk of making wise investment choices and planning for decades of retirement now falls entirely on workers who have no training to deal with it.

"The goal of trying to educate everybody up so they can do this kind of thing is just silly," Munnell says. "We don't need a whole nation of financial analysts. We need people to play with their children and coach Little League and do all that kind of stuff."

Grim numbers bear out the warnings about Americans' lack of retirement-planning savvy. The Employee Benefit Research Institute reported that 49% of workers say they have total savings and investments, not including the value of their home, of less than $50,000. And 22% of workers and 28% of retirees say they have no savings of any kind.

Andrew Stumpff, a Lansing-based pension expert and lecturer at the University of Michigan Law School, says the approaching storm of unsafe retirements is part of a general shifting of risk toward ordinary workers.

"You need to regard retirement as a do-it-yourself proposition nowadays in a way that it never was for previous generations," he says.

Skipping trips

That shift illustrates the potential change in living standards for retirees of the future.

Today, Vince and Joyce Orban live the sort of retirement that West might have imagined, and one that was typical in recent decades.

Vince retired from Ford Motor Co. in 1994. He and Joyce built a dream home near Gladwin in northern Michigan and settled in for rounds of golf, winter trips to the Sunbelt and visits with their grandkids.