Strategy consultants Kevin and Shawn Coyne offer a provocative take on the Boomer retirement hype industry in an article and video interview at BusinessWeek.com. After combing through the numbers, they point out that 78 million Boomers won’t all be retiring at once, and that what some have called a tsunami really will look more like a rolling wave. Upshot: the market for retirement services looks less like a 78 million-person opportunity, and something more like 29 million. As a result, they argue, the growth rate in retired individuals will be much lower than thought, with financial services companies the big losers as they battle for market share to justify their huge investments in this market.

The Coynes argument rests of a few key assertions:

• The actual number of “true retirees,” which excludes those who never worked in the first place, will reach only 46 million in 2017.
• More Americans will choose to work beyond the traditional retirement age of 65
• The growth assumption is less than 3%, and the more likely growth rate is under 1%

My take: It’s always useful to cut through the hype about the Boomer market, where generalizations tend to be taken as fact. But the Coynes’ analysis uses too rigid a definition of “retiree.” The real demographic issue isn’t who has retired from a job and who has not –it’s about the undeniable age tsunami. The challenges of retirement security and health care issues are real and will be defining questions for business and government in the years ahead.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 8:55 am and is filed under Economy, Financial Services, Marketing, Workforce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.