When Janet Barnett hears that some big financial advisers predict people may need as much income for a comfortable retirement as they earned in their working years, she can only wonder.

"If that's the case, I'll never [be able to] retire," Barnett said, although she has every intention of doing so. The 63-year-old Penn Hills resident who owns a day care center already has cut her schedule to part time.

Carole Lampe, the North Hills financial planner who advises Barnett and her already retired husband, Ed, 67, tells her clients to gauge retirement needs by spending, not income. Lampe used to project retirees would need 80 percent of what they spent when they were working, but lately, she's estimating they will need more, mainly to keep up with rising health-care costs.

Many other industry projections of retirement needs are based on preretirement income, but they have one thing in common with Lampe's: They're going up.

Not so long ago, estimates of what people would need in retirement were as low as 65 percent of preretirement income. Some projections remain as low as 75 percent and studies of people who already have retired suggest they live on even less.

But increasingly, big investment and benefits analysts, such as Fidelity Investments and Watson Wyatt Worldwide, say rising health-care costs and the lifestyles of baby boomers argue they'll need substantially more.

For one thing, baby boomers may carry more debt into retirement than their frugal parents did. Some analysts also expect baby boomers will want to continue their pre-retirement consumption patterns, possibly traveling more frequently and eating out more often. They are also expected to live longer.

The revised projections from Fidelity, which this month said future retirees would need 80 percent to 100 percent of their pre-retirement income, and from Watson Wyatt, which pushed the figure to 105 percent a few years ago, come just as the generation born between 1946 and 1966 faces a host of financial challenges: college costs for children that have outpaced inflation; the continued decline of traditional pension plans that guarantee an income; 401(k) investments that are well short of where they should be; and the likelihood that Social Security benefits will face cuts.

Not all financial advisers and trend watchers are bearing such a worrisome message.

Some believe baby boomers may reinvent retirement to suit themselves, much as they did child-rearing.

Instead of stopping work cold at 65, they may happily dabble a day or more a week in their old careers -- or even new ones -- well into retirement.

And instead of hanging onto houses in cities where home values have soared, some may cash in and relocate to places where the living is easier and cheaper. After all, the thinking goes, baby boomers in their youth advocated simpler, less material lifestyles before taking on payments for plasma screen televisions and SUVs.

Hitting a million

Still, most financial planners and investment firms are beating the drums for baby boomers to stash away savings for retirement before it's too late.

For example, a retirement primer on the Web site of Stiles Financial Services, a Minnesota financial planning firm, states that the "harsh reality is that most baby boomers ... will need a good million to retire and maintain a similar lifestyle to their pre-retirement years."

Susan Stiles, who heads the firm, said the estimate should serve as "a wake-up call" to show what it would take to replace 80 percent of a $50,000 pre-retirement income 20 years from now, when 45-year old baby boomers reach retirement age. Her forecast is modest: It assumes inflation averages 4 percent annually and investments returns average 10 percent before inflation, and includes income from Social Security, even though she believes it could be greatly reduced in two decades.

To sock away a million in 20 years, a 45-year-old couple with no savings and a $50,000 income -- roughly the U.S. family median -- would need to put aside $16,548 a year, roughly 27 percent of their pretax income, Stiles said.

There's certainly reason for concern that people aren't saving enough, said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Estimates of what middle income workers ages 45 to 54 were supposed to have invested by now in 401(k)s are a far cry from reality: By now, their average accounts should contain $156,000, but they hold only $37,000, said Munnell.

The good news, she said, is that current retirees could live on a good bit less that what the conventional wisdom seems to be.

Munnell's research center in January published a study showing that median per person spending for couples between ages 65 and 75 was $15,681, roughly 68 percent of their pre-retirement income, adjusted for inflation.

Georgia State University's business school, which has been running a research program since 1987 to estimate retirement income needs, projects that couples facing retirement can maintain their lifestyles by replacing anywhere from 75 percent of their income, if they are earning $60,000 a year, to 89 percent if they're making $20,000 annually. Generally, people in lower income brackets need higher percentages because they already were getting by on minimums.

But why such a big difference between Georgia State's estimates and others, such as Fidelity or Watson Worldwide?

For one thing, most predictions are for future retirees and therefore take into account years of inflation, which Georgia State's does not because it's geared toward 65-year-olds who want to retire now.

Boston College's Munnell said projections at the low end also tend to apply more to people who expect to retire with their mortgages paid off, because mortgage payments represent one of the largest single expenses for many households.

Watson Worldwide, which advises corporate benefits managers overseeing pensions and 401(k)s, also takes into account the likelihood that some people will retire early and need to entirely cover their own health insurance before becoming eligible for Medicare.

"There's no [single] good formula," said Carrie Coghill, a financial planner with D.B. Root & Co., Downtown.

Individual situations vary so widely that people really have to examine their own budgets and project the changes retirement will bring, she said. Commuting and other work-related costs likely will go down, but other expenses, perhaps for traveling, may go up.

Health-care costs also are expected to keep rising, retirement experts said.

Those costs are why Barnett, the day care center owner from Penn Hills, plans to continue working at least until she is eligible for Medicare.

"I figure I can cover our medical expenses by doing that and not touch our investments," she said.

By paying off their mortgage, Barnett and her husband rid themselves of one of their biggest preretirement expenses.

Communal living

How much debt some baby boomers might carry into retirement is a concern among many retirement experts. So are the baby boomers' lifestyles and expectations.

"My fear for this generation, with its need for instant gratification, is that it's going to be hard to sustain a full-time retirement," said Coghill.

But J.Walker Smith, president of the Atlanta-based market research firm Yankelovich Partners, which takes credit for coining the term "baby boom," said full-time retirement is not what the baby boomers expect.

He said surveys continually show two-thirds or more of baby boomers not only plan to work in retirement, but that many want to do so. Respondents to the surveys also often say they will have to, he added.

Some other prognosticators agree that baby boomers might seek to work longer. But they also suspect many will opt for lifestyles requiring less income.

"All these projections in the end, don't mean a lot," said Fred Brock, author of a recently published book, "Retire on Less than You Think."

"People are going to do what they have to to live," he said.

A former New York Times columnist who wrote extensively about retirement issues, he said surveys suggest baby boomers "are going to sell the houses they have in these hip urban areas" and move to less expensive locations, including smaller Midwestern towns.

"I predict you're going to see a great migration," said Brock, who himself retired early, relocating from New York City to teach journalism at Kansas State University.

Moving not only will enable baby boomers to cash in on soaring home values in cities such as New York, Boston and Washington, it will enable them to pursue less hectic lifestyles, which surveys suggest many want.

Steve Vernon, author of "Live Long and Prosper," another in a spate of books published this year about taking the worry out of retirement, said he also believes people will manage with far less money than they made when they worked.

Vernon, who also is a vice president and consulting actuary for Watson Wyatt, the firm that projected retirement needs at 105 percent of preretirement income, said the reality is "most Americans won't come near that."

But he also maintained most won't need to. "It's just going to require some creativity," Vernon said.

Under one retirement scenario, people might continue working but scale back to part time or do something that gives them some of the benefits they want from retirement in a less expensive way, Vernon said. For example, his research put him in contact with a retired couple who chaperone a travel program for college students. Their own transportation and accommodations were paid for in return for their service.

Vernon also imagines future retirees will find ways to cut the cost of their housing, whether by downsizing or sharing housing costs with other older adults.

Among baby boomers who touted the benefits of communal living in their youth, he imagines some retirees might get together in the equivalent of "old people's communes."

"Five people living together on $90,000 a year can live quite nicely," he said, noting that today's average Social Security income -- about $18,000 annually -- would provide that. Those kinds of arrangements also would alleviate the isolation associated with old age.

"What research shows is that having a rich social network, doing things with friends and family, those are the things that make people satisfied with their lives," Vernon said.

Although slightly older than baby boomers, Barnett said she and her husband have faced many of the same issues during their working lives and expect to roll with the same punches in retirement.

Neither had a traditional pension. They did have retirement savings plans but had to pay college loans for two children before their contributions hit full stride.

Between Social Security and income from savings, Barnett estimates she and her husband probably will generate about half of their preretirement income when she stops working.

Whether it will be enough, "Who really knows? But I think we can manage that or at least adjust to manage that," she said. "We really are happy with a relatively simple life."

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Correction/Clarification: (Published March 23, 2005)This story in March 20, 2005 editions had an incorrect figure for the annual savings needed to bank $1 million over 20 years at a 10 percent rate of return before inflation. Rounded to the nearest whole dollar, it would require a savings of $16,548 a year.