This post is part of a weekly mashup called the “Compost” which is a tribute to my love for gardening and features the posts that caught my eye this past week concerning baby boomers. I didn’t realize it until after completing this post that 3 of the 6 posts come from the Financial Post. Guess I like them.
(Great post to help you think about how to make your own family plan)
WASHINGTON — My mother passed away recently, a few months before her 91st birthday, after having spent the better part of the last 70 years smoking heavily and avoiding exercise whenever possible. But this isn’t a health article, it’s a financial one, and on that score I have learned a lot from my mother.
(How to compute what you’ll need in terms of longevity and inflation)
Barring yet another market meltdown, wealthy Canadian Baby Boomers are entering the home stretch in the long marathon to retirement. Many aged 49 to 64 are just now just three to seven years away, according to a study by Vancouver-based Rogers Group Financial Advisors. The national study of 300 Boomers with at least $500,000 in financial assets was commissioned by Rogers managing director Clay Gillespie. He finds 30 to 50% of this group consider themselves in the home stretch but as noted here last week, this also means their time horizon for tolerating investment risk has shrunk.
(Will you need that house with everything on one floor)
I spent the first seven years of my life living in a bungalow, a one-story structure where we all slept on the main floor with a playroom for the kids in the basement. I have good memories. The house still exists but if you listen to the real estate community, bungalows in the city will soon be extinct, a victim of soaring land prices and demands from families for more indoor space at the expense oflarger backyards.
(If you choose to live high now and pay later, this gives a hint about when to talk to a planner )
Driving to work in his Aston Martin, Ernest, as well call him, is a success by almost any measure. At age 51, he is a Toronto-based senior sales executive for a global technology company, pulling down a $145,000 annual salary plus $30,000 annual bonus. His wife, whom well call Debbie, also 51, heads up marketing for a chemical company. Her gross income is $95,000 a year including a $20,000 annual bonus. Their combined pre-tax annual incomes, $270,000, enable them to live a very comfortable life with superb cars — the British ride for him, a vintage Benz for her, a fine home, extensive travel and handsome gifts to their four grown children.
(These are possible direct stock investments boomers should know about and possibly invest in)
Forget the jokes about Viagra and adult diapers. And for the moment, put aside your skepticism about investing in the stock market at all. Just consider that there might be a way to profit from aging baby boomers.
(This is your standard fear mongering piece)
BABY Boomers are turning into “Baby Gloomers” – a fifth of them face retirement with an unpaid mortgage. While most say they have given it no thought, a quarter say they will have to dip into their super to clear their mortgage. Boomers are more likely than most to stash cash at home rather than in low-interest savings accounts.
I am finishing this post out with a question posed by CNN which is Are baby boomers to blame for a broken government. This has to be a gag question. No we are not to blame. But we will have to get involved to fix things. We changed the face of society at every phase of our aging process. So this will be no different. We just don’t know how things will turn out. I am really interested in what you think. Leave me a comment please.
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