Last week, Mark Hurd settled a lawsuit brought on by his former employer Hewlett-Packard after he was hired to help lead rival Oracle. You might remember Hurd resigned as HP CEO in August, following an internal investigation that found he falsified expense forms to conceal a relationship with a former TV reality show contestant turned marketing consultant, Jodie Fisher. Fisher had charged Hurd with sexual harassment (they eventually settled out of court).

A significant number of women seem to be adopting a precarious retirement planning strategy.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies nearly half of women expect to keep working past age 70. What’s worse, nearly one in five of those quizzed admit that they actually have no plan to retire whatsoever.

That’s great, assuming you can hang on to a job that long. But how many of us actually end up doing that?

Not as many as you might think.

Christopher Buckley’s satirical novel ‘Boomsday’ takes place in a not-so-distant future in which the U.S. is facing a multi-trillion-dollar deficit and massive tax hikes to pay for the retirement of all those resource-hogging baby boomers.

Fed up with shouldering the burden of this pampered group of ‘wrinklies,’ Buckley’s 29-year-old protagonist devises a plan: Pass a law urging and handsomely rewarding boomers to kill themselves — suicide is to be known as “voluntary transitioning — at the ripe old age of 70.

Of course, he was just kidding around. But those worried about aging boomers’ effect on the welfare state aren’t — not by a long shot. Predictions for the nation’s health care system have been nothing short of apocalyptic.

Here’s the latest: Four in every five Canadians believe that the demands placed on the health system by aging boomers will result in reduced access and lower quality care, according to a recent study by the Canadian Medical Association.