I spent last week with some of the nation’s top experts on retirement security at a fellowship program hosted by the National Press Foundation (NPF) and underwritten by Prudential. Our group of 17 journalists heard presentations on Social Security, pensions, health care, annuities, retirement housing and the federal budget deficit. All the sessions were on the record, and I plan to use a good deal of the material soon in Retire Smart columns. In the meantime, NPF has posted audio and Powerpoint presentations on its website. Each of the sessions runs about an hour, but if you’re interested in a five-star briefing on any of these issues, look no farther. Highlights:
Our Fiscal Future. Isabel Sawhill, Senior Fellow and co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution.
Change in the Air. John Rother, Group Executive Officer of Policy and Strategy for AARP.
What Americans Know About Retirement. Barbara Bovbjer, Director for Education, Workforce and Income Security Issues at the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Decumulation. Mary Beth Franklin, Senior editor of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine.
A former sales manager in the active adult housing industry has launched a website that helps prospective buyers research and compare age-restricted communities around the U.S. 55Places.com showcases more than 50 active retirement communities throughout 11 popular retirement states. The site includes community descriptions, pricing and association fees, photos and lists of about amenities and social clubs. The site claims to offer “objective independent reviews of all active adult communities,” including both new and “resale” developments. The founder is Bill Ness a former sales manager for Del Webb Corporation, the largest developer of active adult communities in the country.
Civic Ventures released a report last year highlighting the innovative work certain states are doing around the U.S. to tap into the growing number of Baby Boomers interested in second careers. Civic Ventures focuses on enabling careers in fields that make a positive contribution to society, such as teaching and health care. The report looks at efforts in Arizona, California, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York to help older workers find meaningful work and to volunteer their time. I had a chance to talk about Civic Ventures’ work in this area recently with Stefanie Weiss, the organization’s vice president for communications. Here’s an edited video of our conversation.
You can download a PDF of the Civic Ventures report on state innovation here.
Judging by its programming, I would have guessed PBS already had a pretty good bead on the 50+ audience; the network’s schedule is packed with Boomer and nostalgia rock music, travel, food and personal discovery shows. But the network seems ready to do more. PBS is launching a new “Public Television 50-Plus Initiative,” according to Paul Kleyman, who writes Age Beat Online, the Newsletter of the Journalists Exchange on Aging. Here’s an edited summary of Paul’s interesting missive on the initiative:
“This is not just an initiative that is a one-year activity we’ll then cycle off into something else; this really should be the basis for the scope of work we should take up for now and the future. So we really should get this as right as we can out of the box.” That was the message Paula Kerger, PBS President and CEO, had for a select group of about 50 leaders in aging and top executives from throughout public television about the system’s new Public Television 50-Plus Initiative.
Speaking at a “summit” held near PBS headquarters in suburban Washington, D.C., in late April, Kerger noted that the system hopes to have as dramatic an impact on raising the quality of programming for older viewers as PBS did on children’s programming. In the next decade, she said, PBS intends to extend its penetration into the same older audience that other entities in broadcasting have long disdained as a liability, those past the vaunted 18-49 age group. Although the 50-Plus Initiative proposal places most emphasis on the boomer generation, it also states that programming will be developed for more senior age groups.
The 50-Plus Initiative, Kerger said, is part of a wider effort to secure the future of PBS and its 355 affiliated stations, while the media world is changing in an “ever complicated, ever fractured manner.”
The 50-Plus Initiative is the brainchild of Jim Pagliarini, president and CEO of Twin Cities Public Television (TCPT), and Judy Diaz, managing director of brand strategy for PBS. With development funding from The Atlantic Philanthropies, they commissioned market research last year showing that “at any given second in primetime, 1.4 million people 50-plus are watching series such as NewsHour, Now and Nova,” according to a summary provided to attendees. At present, according to the PBS study, 89 million people, about 30% of the U.S. population, are 50 or older. Although the research determined that PBS programs already serve its more mature audience, “that content was not consistent or aligned in such a way to realize potentially powerful audience outcomes.”
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.
That is just too good to pass up. Anyway, as Wired reports:
Tributes.com is scheduled for a soft launch in June. It aims to provide a central location to house online memorials for those who have passed on. It’s starting with $4.3 million in funding, with The Wall Street Journal as a lead investor.
Jeff is the founder of Eons.com, which had an initial focus on death notices that some found a little creepy. Tributes.com goes down the path pioneered by Legacy.com, which lets the bereaved post online memories of loved ones. Wired also notes that online tributes have taken off at sites like MySpace and Facebook.
I spent last week with some of the nation’s top experts on retirement security at a fellowship program hosted by the National Press Foundation (NPF) and underwritten by Prudential. Our group of 17 journalists heard presentations on Social Security, pensions, health care, annuities, retirement housing and the federal budget deficit. All the sessions were on the record, and I plan to use a good deal of the material soon in Retire Smart columns. In the meantime, NPF has posted audio and Powerpoint presentations on its website. Each of the sessions runs about an hour, but if you’re interested in a five-star briefing on any of these issues, look no farther. Highlights:
should be the basis for the scope of work we should take up for now and the future. So we really should get this as right as we can out of the box.” That was the message Paula Kerger, PBS President and CEO, had for a select group of about 50 leaders in aging and top executives from throughout public television about the system’s new Public Television 50-Plus Initiative.
