Boomers ? from Hippies to Yuppies to “Drippies” ? face a potential retirement catastrophe. Here’s what to do.
by Rick Telberg/At Large
Rick Telberg
Do you know any Baby Boomers? You probably do. They’re all over the place. And so are their plans for retirement.
A lot of those plans, finance and accounting professionals say, are woefully inadequate. A lot of Boomers are in for a fall. And, this is 2006 – the year when (gulp) the first Baby Boomers turn 60 years old.
Ethan Fisher, a consultant with Deloitte Tax in San Diego, echoed the most common warning: “Too much reliance on Social Security.”
Maybe that’s just the default excuse. Respondents identified several reasons between here and 65: “Too much debt”; “Started too late”; “Unable to save”; “Just never got around to it, and here it is.?”
TODAY’S ACTION ITEMS
Sift out the high net worth clients.
Examine their tax returns.
Determine which of them need additional tax and/or financial planning services.
Introduce the idea in the tax-return discussion.
Stay in touch using informational materials.
Don’t forget to follow up after tax season.
Have some more good ideas worth sharing? Comments? Questions? Rants or Raves? Tell Rick at RickT@BayStreetGroup.com.
Fully 93 percent of finance and accounting professionals told Bay Street Group, in a poll conducted for the CPA Insider? that the Baby Boom Generation is not adequately prepared for retirement. Eighty-three percent say the Boomers suffer from under-funded retirement accounts, 60 percent say they’ll have to work longer than expected, 57 percent say they have unreasonably high expectations for their investments, and almost as many said that portfolios are poorly invested or poorly balanced.
When we asked about the various reasons these aging workers have been so lax, we got various answers.
Maybe it’s as simple as Vic Butcher, of Butcher Financial Services in Cordova, Tenn., says: “Pure laziness.”
Or it might be laziness compounded by “lack of planning.”
But it could also be a number of other simple roadblocks. “Failure to obtain professional advice,” says Gary J. Young, of Young & Company CPAs in Rochester, New York.
“Failure to plan at all,” says W. Patrick Harmon, of Harmon & Associates.
“Emotional incompetence to manage own investments,” says an anonymous commentator.
That sounds like a lot of people we know. We also know a few like this, contributed by an anonymous financial professional in Florida: “No plan, just misplaced hope.”
A lot of responses started with “Under-.” as in:
Underestimating cost of health care
Underestimating future cost of living
Underfunded regular savings accounts
Understanding how much money they will actually need
“Too” came up a lot, as in:
Too high an expected standard of living
Too much complexity managing financial portfolio
Too much debt
But the most common word was “Failure”:
Failure to get professional advice
Failure to have after-tax retirement investment accounts
Failure to invest additional amounts outside of 401(k)
Failure to live in present with reduced debt
Failure to live within current means
Failure to make plans
Failure to obtain professional advice
Failure to plan for beneficiaries of plans
Failure to seek professional advice
I hope you haven’t failed to see what this adds up to: Boomers are in desperate need of catch-up investment. Some have about a week to make up for lost time. Most have a matter of years. Some have a decade or more.
And all can use a little professional advice from somebody they can trust ? their mothers, for example, or, better, a financial professional – somebody who can crunch the beans and tell them whether to pay off the house, beef up their IRA, put a kid through medical school, vote Democratic, or shorten retirement by taking up cigarettes.
Boomers did a remarkable job of shifting from hippie to yuppie, but how willingly will they become Dreading Retirement Professionals? And there’s your niche: Drippies.
Quick. Help them. They need you.
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