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You Call This Retirement? Boomers Still Have Work to Do

As the idea of the American retiree evolves, not so many will be hitting the links


spinner image The Evolution of the Retiree, How Boomers Changed Retirement
Boomers may face retirement reality that financial planning and saving may not have been enough.
Dan Saelinger; Prop Stylist: Dominique Baynes

Americans have a total of $24 trillion set aside in retirement assets, according to the most recent numbers released by the Investment Company Institute. The problem is that it's still not enough.

Part of the challenge is funding longer life spans. In 1900, the average life span was 47. But a 65-year-old today can expect to live nearly two more decades. "It's the dream of history," says the psychologist and gerontologist Ken Dychtwald, whose research firm Age Wave dissects the massive "maturing market" of aging boomers. "For thousands of years we searched for fountains of youth."

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Now we've found it — or at least a minor tributary of it. We've also found the bad news, which starts with money.

First, a little history. In 1967 a third of those 65 or older lived below the poverty line; in 2012 only about 9 percent did. This historic reversal, due largely to Social Security, Medicare and the widespread reliance on defined-benefit pensions, might not last much longer. "A greater percentage of the elderly will be poor or near poor than in the last 40 years," warns retirement expert Teresa Ghilarducci of New York's New School for Social Research.

Why? Simply put, the boomers are not saving nearly enough to offset the disappearance of pensions. A Fidelity Investments report says that 48 percent of boomers are not on track to be able to afford basic expenses in retirement. That figure is echoed by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), which declared in 2010 that 47 percent of the oldest boomers were at risk.

EBRI released a report in March 2016 showing that retirement confidence has increased since the Great Recession: In 2013, 13 percent of workers said they were very confident about having enough money for a comfortable retirement, and by 2016, that percentage had increased to 21 percent. Still, 19 percent say they are not at all confident.

Maybe this shouldn't surprise anyone: A generation that swore never to get old turns out to be not stellar at retirement planning. Combine that with the rocky economy and the individualistic way most of us are now forced to save, and the results might be financially catastrophic.

The story has been oft told. What we think of today as the way almost everyone plans for retirement began as a small shift in the tax code in the late 1970s, designed to help a few high-earning corporate executives by letting them put aside a percentage of their salary on a tax-deferred basis. But soon the Reagan administration decided that companies could offer the benefit to all employees — and the 401(k) was born.

The 401(k) was meant to supplement, not replace, traditional pensions. Instead, companies began dropping their pension programs. Today, they've all but disappeared from the private sector. Only 10 percent of boomer-age workers can expect income from defined-benefit programs. Less than two decades ago, more than half retired with pension income.

What killed the pension system? It was hope, but hope mixed with desperation and a bit of greed. The rise of the self-funded retirement dovetailed with the great bull market of the 20th century, when the Standard & Poor's 500 index increased by more than 1,000 percent in nearly 20 years. That growth allowed many to believe that stock market gains were inevitable, and that their own investing prowess was responsible for them.

And no one fell for it harder than the boomers, a generation that always believed in the power of me. Their prime working years coincided with the stock market bonanza.

But the reality, as indicated by a slew of ever-more-sobering studies, is a little more complex. Fidelity claims that someone 55 or older who has been active in his or her 401(k) for the past 10 years is likely to have $269,500 saved, which sounds grand until you hear that $220,000 will just cover medical expenses for a 65-year-old couple in retirement. And most Americans don't have nearly that much anyway. According to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, the typical account for a worker nearing retirement is only $42,000. And 55 percent of current workers don't have any employment-based savings at all. AARP says that three-quarters of Americans between 55 and 64 have less than $30,000 socked away. It all adds up to a $6.6 trillion gap between what we have and what we need.

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So what happens now? The answer is that you change what people consider "retirement" to be. And it turns out, we're already doing it. We just didn't know it.

Retirement itself is a very modern concept, a byproduct of postwar prosperity and longer life spans. For most of history, those lucky few who managed to reach an advanced age kept working until they were physically unable; rural life and extended families provided the safety net. But the Industrial Revolution and the longevity revolution put an end to that. Enter Social Security, which offered older Americans both a bulwark against poverty and an encouragement to leave the workforce.

If you ask Marc Freedman, the founder of Encore.org, those postwar retirement communities in the Leisure World mode were less about leisure and more about warehousing people who no longer had an economic role in society. "We made a virtue out of necessity," he says. As for our current situation? "We need to come up with a different solution."

And we have that solution. In one of the great ironies of history, the Me Generation will transform into the We Generation in its later years. "Boomers will not so much be doing their own thing," says Age Wave's Dychtwald. "They'll be helping out the grandchildren and maybe having a sister move in."

Many theorists predict that employers will eventually adapt and absorb this army of boomers who either desire or need to remain on the job at ages when their parents were working on their golf strokes. But there are other needs, too. "Whatever economic challenges the over-65s are facing these days, they pale by comparison with the money troubles of the young," writes Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center in the new book The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown. Staggered by a slow economic recovery and their hefty college debts, today's younger people are going to need all the help they can get.

Often, they are finding that assistance from boomers: A 2013 Merrill Lynch–Age Wave survey found that 62 percent of those 50 or older had helped out family members financially in the past five years. Other boomers are pitching in with unpaid labor: Currently 30 percent of preschoolers are taken care of by grandparents when Mom or Dad is at work or school.

So there is meaningful work aplenty. Even if boomers wanted to amble off to the fishing hole for the remainder of their years, the rest of us can't afford to let them: We still need them here.

And this is an apt thing, in many ways. "Boomers want to be where the action is," Dychtwald says — and they'll get their wish. "I don't think all 78 million boomers are going to have an easy and carefree time of it. I do think we will make it a more robust and interesting period of life than we have to date."

But there's also a danger of creating unrealistic expectations for older adults, says Marty Martinson, professor of health education at San Francisco State University. "It's one thing to say we need to create communities where elders are part of the fabric of what is going on," she says. "But we've constructed this idea of the 90-year-old surfer-volunteer as the ideal retiree." Yes, older people want to be active, useful parts of society, Martinson is quick to add. But this should be a choice, not an obligation.

There is something to be said for Martinson's take. If we once implied that older Americans had a duty to go off and enjoy themselves, we're now risking expecting the exact opposite — that they have responsibility to the rest of us.

No wonder "retirement" no longer seems like the right word to describe this strange new time. The idea of having a life after leaving the workforce barely existed a century ago; today, it's an institution. As circumstances change, so will what we think we want from this still-evolving life stage. It's going to be a work in progress for a long time.

And that's a good thing. For a generation that has always defied expectations, this last act will be one to watch.

Helaine Olen is the author of Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry.

As the last of the Baby Boomer Generation turns 50 and more baby boomers are retiring, AARP celebrates the generation that changed the world.

© Sandra J. Huston, Texas Tech University

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