Boomers are Peaking
Guess what comes next?
Ric Edelman: It's Tuesday, May 14th. On today's show, the Boomers are peaking. I've told you of the new focus on boomer retirement readiness. Thanks most recently to Larry Fink. If you missed that podcast link is in the show notes. Here's why this crisis is really peaking – 30 million Americans are going to retire between now and the end of the decade, 30 million.
You know what a baby boomer is. These people are now being called peak Boomers because they are peaking in their careers right now. More than half of them, 53% to be exact, have less than $250,000 in assets, according to a new study. Our nation has never had so many people reaching retirement age in such a short period. We're talking 30 million people reaching retirement in the next six years. Most of these people not only don't have the money to maintain their standard current of living, most of them won't even be able to meet the cost of housing, food, and health care.
It's actually worse than this. Because yeah, half have less than $250,000 another and 15% have between 250 and 500 grand. These folks are going to struggle just as much. So we're really talking about two thirds of new retirees over the next five, six years struggling financially in their new retirement.
I mean, think about this. If you want your money to last as long as you do, you don't want to spend more than 4% of your assets each year. So if you have $500,000 in your investments, that means you can only spend $20,000 a year out of it. That's $1,700 a month. You add in Social Security, the average check is $1,500. We're talking about $3,200 a month that you'll be able to have that you can spend. By the way, that's pre-tax. This is for people who routinely earn $100,000 a year. And that's for those who have $500,000 in savings. If you've only got half that, $250,000, because we're saying half of the nation does, you're only going to be able to spend $2,400 a month.
Half of the country's new retirees aren't even going to be able to spend that much because half of them don't even have the $250,000 to start with. A lot of people are going to be living with their children. I'll tell you that. And this situation is not just a problem for the workers and the kids, it's a problem for the whole country.
We're talking about 10% of the US workforce quitting over the next five years. Yeah, we have the younger generation who's going to be entering the workforce, but that'll make up for some of the people who are leaving, but not all of it. First of all, there aren't as many people entering the labor market as there are people leaving it.
And the people leaving have much higher incomes than the people who are entering. The bottom line, there's going to be a reduction in consumer spending, and that means a reduction in GDP. Studies say that consumer spending is going to fall 15%. This is going to hit the transportation sector hard, along with utilities, wholesale trade, and real estate. All of them are going to see falling revenues. And the worst part is that a whole lot of those peak Boomers, they are grossly underestimating how long they're going to live. If they assume they're going to die in their 80s, they think it's okay to spend, oh, not just 4% of their money every year, but 8%, maybe 10% of their money.
And they think they have to, because they're going to want to maintain their lifestyle. The result is that a lot of these people are going to go broke in their 70s and 80s, because they'll discover, too late, with regret, that they had spent too much in their 60s. Less than 40% of these people use a financial advisor, so they have no idea what they're in for. What can you expect is going to happen?
Here's what's going to happen as a result of the Boomers that are peaking in their careers. A lot of people are going to be retiring over the next five years. This is going to create new career opportunities for people who are five to ten years younger.
They're going to have the opportunity to get promoted into the jobs that the Boomers are leaving and a lot of the people who do retire are going to discover within a few years that they can't stay retired. Some of them are going to be bored, but a lot of them are going to realize they need the money and they're going to return to the workforce.
They're going to have to hope that they're going to be healthy enough to do that and that their spouse is going to be healthy, meaning they don't have to stay home to serve as a caretaker. And that their old skills will still be good enough for them to get a job. And they'll have to contend with ageism in the workplace.
Will employers be willing to hire them? I think increasingly so. Because employers are going to be struggling to find enough workers. Good, quality, experienced workers. And these retirees will have a lot of that. A lot of experience, a lot of maturity. Most of them are going to be great people to hire.
There's also going to be new pressure on our healthcare system, which doesn't have the structure or the capacity to handle all the geriatric care that's going to be needed. There's also going to be new pressure on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, paying out a level of benefits that these programs never had to pay out before.
This is going to cause big funding problems for these entitlement programs. That's going to add pressure to the federal budget. That will lead to bigger budgets and bigger deficits, higher taxes, higher interest rates, and more interest expense for the government, and thus a larger federal debt. And just as all this is peaking, the Social Security Trust Fund will be depleting, compounding the problem. What's going to happen to the stock and bond markets and the real estate markets as a result of all this? Well, stay tuned and talk now with your financial advisor. And if you are that financial advisor, you need to start talking now with your Boomer clients and your Millennial clients about their parents so that everyone can see this train wreck coming. With plenty of advanced preparation, you can reduce the impact and come out of it intact. But you need to pay attention to all this starting right now.
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On tomorrow's show, the changes that pension funds are making to their investments.
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Links from today’s show:
VISION – Register Now: https://dacfp.com/2024-dacfp-vision/
Larry Fink Brings Needed Attention to the Retirement Crisis (5/9/24 Episode): https://www.thetayf.com/blogs/this-weeks-stories/larry-fink-brings-needed-attention-to-the-retirement-crisis
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