Alas, there are no simple answers in determining retirement needs.

How much money are you going to need for your retirement? If you re in the middle class and up, you hear some astonishing numbers. Some professional planners say you can't do it on less than $1 million or even $2 million.

The numbers get wilder as baby boomers panic about their retirement prospects and as Wall Street pumps up its sales pitch for diverting savings into stocks.

How much you think you'll need, however, depends a lot on whom you speak with. A reporter I know visited nine professionals, asking, "How much more do I have to save for my retirement?" She's single, in her mid-30s, with $50,000 from a buyout when she left a previous job. On her current job, she has a 401(k) plan plus a shot at a traditional pension.

At the end of her odyssey, she was more confused than ever.

She gave everyone the same financial data and stated the same general retirement goals. Two advisers told her she didn't have to save anything more. One said she was going to need $3 million. The others fell somewhere in between.

If professionals can differ that widely, you can't go terribly wrong by doing the planning yourself.

For a good fix on where you are and what you need, try the free retirement planner offered by the mutual-fund group T. Rowe Price (call 800-638-5660). If you'd like to purchase software on retirement planning, consider those from the mutual-fund groups T. Rowe Price (800-541-1472), Vanguard (800-950-1971) and Fidelity (800-457-1768), or the Quicken Financial Planner (call its maker, Intuit, at 800-446-8848. Disclosure: I helped develop the Quicken disk).

Most boomers will have more for retirement than the generation before them. For example, take 50- to 54-year-olds. The number with tax-deferred retirement savings rose to 46 percent in 1991, from 36 percent in 1984, says David Wise, a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

They're saving more money because they have higher real incomes than their parents did. Adjusted for inflation, households headed by people 35 to 44 earned 53 percent more than the comparable age group in 1959, according to a 1993 study by the Congressional Budget Office.

Boomers may face higher expenses in retirement than their parents did. To take one obvious example, you will almost certainly have to pay more of your own medical expenses - both out-of-pocket costs and higher health-insurance premiums. Social Security benefits will also shrink in some way, especially for the well-to-do.

Younger people overwhelmingly say that Social Security will fail. But it's solvent for at least 30 years, and could mn in perpetuity with minor tax hikes and modest increases in the retirement age.

A significant fraction of people reach retirement age with virtually no financial assets of their own. For this reason, America will almost certainly vote to keep Social Security going, even if in a slightly different form.

The risk you most underestimate is your own longevity. Social Security projects an average life expectancy of about 81 by 2070, compared with 76 today. Based on these numbers, you might assume that you won't live past 85 or so.

But Ronald Lee, professor of demography at the University of California at Berkeley, thinks that average life expectancy will reach 87 by 2070. Hundreds of thousands of boomers are going to live well into their 90s and even past 100.

What's the answer? "Save more and keep working," says Olivia Mitchell, director of the Pension Research Council at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Retirees will increasingly take pan-time work.

The good news is that boomers, on average, should have little trouble matching the standard of living of their parents' generation, says James Smith, senior economist at Rand, a think tank in Santa Monica.

Middle-aged workers may already have a modest retirement in hand, especially if they have an employer-paid pension. But workers in general expect something better than that, and they're not yet saving enough to achieve it.

Policymakers can help them by restructuring private pensions and Social Security, to discourage retirements earlier than 65. Any new tax breaks should focus on getting workers to start or expand their personal savings plans. Even without a tax incentive, people generally save more in their 50s - an age when they start to hear the shuffling footsteps of time.

Sweet notes

Here's an idea for investors who like their profits guaranteed. Buy the new, inflation-protection U.S. Treasury notes the very first time they go on sale.

Because the notes are new and untested, bond experts believe that their initial yield may be higher than you'd get from regular Treasuries. "I'd call it an ideal auction for everybody to get into," says William Gross, managing director of Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO).

These securities guarantee that inflation won't erode your purchasing power. Whether inflation goes up or down, you get a fixed, real return.

Say, for example, that the new notes pay 3.5 percent plus the inflation rate. At 3 percent inflation, your total return would be 6.5 percent. At 5 percent inflation, you'd get 8.5 percent. At 1 percent inflation, you'd get 4.5 percent.

In all three cases, your real purchasing power has remained the same. It's always a guaranteed 3.5 percent. You've eliminated inflation risk.

Some investors might buy these bonds as a play on higher inflation but that's the wrong objective, says PIMCO vice president John Brynjolfsson. The right objective is to lock in today's attractive real interest rates.

What's more, the government is issuing these securities "because we are confident we will keep inflation low," says Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

Because they're so low-risk, inflation-protection Treasuries should eventually yield less than straight Treasuries, says bond manager John Holler of The Vanguard Group. But this first time out, Gross predicts, the new securities will have the edge.