Boomers Better Off than Thought

Posted by: Gene M. | Jan 08,2008


I’ll report good information when I see it.  This article shows how the retiring Boomer crop of today – those born in 1946 – are actually better off than all the prognostications about Boomers on the whole.  As I wrote yesterday, I don’t entirely agree with the supposition that Boomers comprise a generation from 1946 and 1964, as the sixties are such a far different generation than the forties.  

Let’s also bear in mind that someone born in 1964 is turning only 44 this year.  That means that they’re around 20 years from retirement, so obviously they’ve not built up a huge retirement savings yet as someone born in the early fifties.  I’d argue that this fact alone could account for the low numbers for Boomer retirement portfolios.  Certainly, younger Boomers are waiting too long to start thinking about saving for retirement, but at the same time they have a long way to go before they file for Social Security.  

The oldest Boomers – and those Boomers who fit the post World War II “boom” implicitly – are shown to be well-prepared for retirement.  So us Boomers aren’t so slack after all, though I really take issue with this sentence from the article, “Maybe that's because only 2% of them report that they attended Woodstock.”  Ha-ha.  Not that I attended Woodstock, but that struck me as overly snide.  

The numbers in that article are basically confirmation about what people have been saying about Boomers all along: that they’re a money-centered generation, having generally moved on from the cultural revolution of the sixties.  It is not surprising, then, that older Boomers do have a particularly healthy investment/savings/retirement portfolio as they head into retirement.  

I think if we were to shrink the definition of what makes a Boomer to those 60 and above, perhaps the current numbers about Boomer debt and savings would be entirely overrated.  The fact is that even though there are technically 85 million Boomers, all of these people aren’t going to retire at once.  Really their going to trickle in over a span of 20 years.  In that amount of time, the current Boomers who have yet to save may save more, lessening the burden on the Social Security system.  Certainly there are Boomers 60 and over who have not saved adequately, but there are not as many as once commonly thought.  

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