In addition, the paperwork necessary for getting your money out of a retirement account easily can take a couple of weeks. That is too long to meet some emergency needs.

Digging Out Of Debt

Eliminating high-interest consumer debt is another priority that generally should come ahead of retirement saving. The percentage of older households carrying debt is troubling: in 2014, some 47 percent of baby boomers still carried mortgage debt (median balance: $90,000), according to the Pew study. Forty-one percent carried credit card debt and 35 percent had an auto loan.

"Getting rid of consumer debt by the time you retire is huge," said Dirk Cotton, a financial planner and retirement researcher who blogs at the Retirement Cafe (http://bit.ly/1nlxKYe). "I have three kids in their twenties, and they’re constantly reading that they need to be saving for retirement. But I tell them there are more important things. One of them is, don’t run up a huge amount of consumer debt."

Retirement researchers often focus on the risk of outliving retirement savings, but Cotton thinks debt - and the absence of liquid saving - poses a bigger risk when financial shocks occur. His research shows that debt leaves households vulnerable to multiple financial shocks. During the Great Recession of 2009, households over age 65 accounted for 8.3 percent of all bankruptcy filings, up from 7.8 percent in 2006, according to the Institute for Financial Literacy.

"It can start with a job loss that forces you to borrow on the credit card to meet living expenses,” Cotton said. "But as the balance grows, the interest rate gets higher and higher, and the credit ultimately is cut off. Now you have a financially devastating problem that is really difficult to escape."

A better approach, he argues, is to focus on debt reduction and aim to maximize retirement income through delayed filing for Social Security benefits.

The prioritization questions are striking, considering that policymakers are pushing for new ways to get us to save more for retirement.

California and Illinois are among the states creating plans that would require employers to cover nearly all workers. Just this week, the Obama administration rolled out a proposal to make it easier for small businesses to band together to form 401(k) plans. (http://reut.rs/20riWG9).

Those are admirable initiatives - but they need to be coupled with sound advice about where the first available dollar should go.