As the Baby Boomers enter retirement and millennials are now the largest segment of the workforce and the consumer base, we’ve noted before that Generation X has somewhat of a middle child syndrome. This might seem particularly true in the financial industry, where Boomers essentially built the industry as we…
Categories: Financial Services, Generation X, RetirementAre we on the verge of a retirement crisis? It depends on who you ask. Conflicting reports abound on the state of American retirement plans. Some say we, on average, are looking OK. Others say we aren’t even close to being ready. Wesley Carpenter, a financial planner with Merrill Lynch,…
Categories: Retirement, What's Working with Cam MarstonOne of the pieces of research we cite the most is the lack of Baby Boomer retirement savings, especially in the younger half of the Boomers. This lack of savings has many implications from their longevity in the workplace to Gen X’s inability to get promoted. Today I’m posting a…
Categories: Financial Services, RetirementMany of us think of the years after 40 as all downhill. But Jeanne Thompson, head of Workplace Solutions Thought Leadership at Fidelity Investments, looks at them as an uphill climb – with retirement as the summit. Thompson, our guest for this episode of “What’s Working with Cam Marston,”sees three…
Categories: Podcast, RetirementAmerica’s Baby Boomers are at the age where they are either retiring or thinking about retiring. Many of them will move south to Florida – a state that has become known as much for its retirement communities as its beaches and theme parks. Others will go west to Arizona, drawn…
Categories: Baby Boomers, RetirementHow much debt are you carrying? Most of us have some credit card debt. Many of us also have mortgages or student loans. Some of us are also carrying debt from home equity loans or lines of credit. As we get older, the volume of debt we’re carrying becomes an…
Categories: Baby Boomers, Home Ownership, RetirementRetirement? What’s that? Though there is some disagreement as to the degree of this phenomenon, it appears that Baby Boomers are typically working longer than their forebears and retiring later in life. TheStreet.com cited a Northwestern Mutual study that found our typical target retirement age is now 68. A Wall…
Categories: Baby Boomers, RetirementThe Great Recession of the late 2000s wreaked havoc on most of our plans in some way. Plans to buy or sell a house, plans to fund a college education, plans to move up in our careers to a better job – all had to be postponed, downsized, or even…
Categories: Baby Boomers, Retirement, Succession Planning, WorkplaceThe Government Accountability Office’s 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances has revealed a rather frightening statistic: About half the U.S. population age 55 or older has no retirement savings. The GAO report found that 48 percent of households age 55 or older have some retirement savings; 23 percent have a defined…
Categories: Baby Boomers, RetirementWe all like to think that 70 is the new 50, but according one group of researchers in Austria, it’s actually so. According to the Telegraph, academics from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis believe that what we call old age shouldn’t be defined by a starting point, such…
Categories: Retirement