Congratulations! You’ve had a successful career and you’re on the brink of retirement. Take a look at that 401(k). Maybe you’re lucky and have a million dollars to stretch out for decades. What does that mean for a monthly budget once you’ve retired? Hard to say, really. And what if you’re the average 60 to 69-year-old? Then the total is $195,500. Try dividing that by a lifetime, should such a calculator exist.
“My dream is to spend the first five to eight years of our retirement visiting parts of the world that we’ve always wanted to see. But I don’t want to live it up and then spend the rest of our retirement wondering whether I can afford to buy my grandkid two scoops of ice cream instead of one.”
Why all the hate? What is with an anti-Baby Boomer movement that I seem to be seeing more of? Imagine my surprise when I read a movie review of Toy Story 4 in which the reviewer ruefully looked at the actions of cowboy Woody and thought: “God, that’s such a baby-boomer move.” The bias gets worse from there, believe it or not.
No less of an authority than the World Economic Forum has confirmed the obvious: there’s a retirement crisis in this country that is only set to get worse. A WEF report compares several major economies and comes up with a stark conclusion. There’s a $28 trillion retirement savings gap in this country that will become a $137 trillion savings gap by 2050.
Rewind back to before Chip Conley received an Influencer in Aging award, before his TED talk and his book. Conley was a seasoned entrepreneur looking for new challenges. He got one in the form of a call from the head of Airbnb, a young startup that wanted to grow and wanted his help. There Conley found his footing working across generations as what he calls a “modern elder.”
Americans hold approximately $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. The longer that you look at that statistic, the more you see: this isn’t “just” a problem for young adults starting out in the world. Borrowers of all ages- parents and grandparents alike- are sacrificing their own retirements in order to repay student debt.
It’s no secret that one tough aspect of retirement planning is settling on the optimal strategy for drawing down a nest egg. Planning for a couple creates an extra level of complexity. Much depends on the lifestyle preferences of each spouse, their different approaches to stock market volatility and, of course, their willingness to compromise.
“In countries that are only now starting to think of older adults as possible consumers for tech, you’ll see startups developing digital health products for the aging- which is great- but older adults are not just patients… The population is extremely diverse, and a 65 year old baby boomer has different wants and needs than their parent who’s 85 years old, although they’re both considered ‘old.’”
Sabrina McLaughlin Smith 