So Baby Boomer: Life Tips

Shop Globally, Buy Locally

Mark Hodesh, owner of Downtown Home & Garden in Ann Arbor, MI says the "buy local' movement has been going on for five years.  “It’s huge,” said Hodesh, who first became involved with the business in 1975. “Sometimes the only qualifier is what’s made locally.”

But the definition of “local” is different for everybody, he said.  Sometimes, merely being made in the United States is enough to qualify.  For example, notice General Motors' new Chevy advertisements spanning the U.S. and featuring the American history of the company.  Perhaps, this relatively new buy locally consumer meme is one of the reasons investors from China (where GM sells more cars than within the U.S.) and the Middle East have accumulated a large amount of ownership shares in the new GM's IPO this month.

As the holiday shopping season takes hold, retailers are jockeying to grab a greater share of online sales, which are expected to rise 16 percent to $52 billion in 2010, according to Forrester Research.

But the influence of the Web is far greater than just direct purchases. It’s also giving consumers the ability to conduct extensive research - sometimes on their smart phones while standing in the aisle of a store - and ask their friends about products on social networking sites like Facebook.

“One of the trends we’re seeing is every purchase has been a more considered purchase, more researched,” said Larry Freed, CEO of Ann Arbor-based ForeSee Results, which conducts some 1 million surveys a month for its online retail clients.  “At the end of the day, the consumer is smarter than they’ve ever been before. They’re more in control than they’ve ever been before, and they’re holding retailers accountable for a great experience.”

In online retail, the gap between the massive global players and the small, niche sellers is widening. The big guys are battling for customers by aggressively discounting goods and offering ubiquitous shipping discounts, or even free shipping in some cases.

That competition intensifies on Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving - in this case Nov. 29 - in which retailers often compete for business by offering huge discounts for web-only purchases.   Amazon.com is the go-to-place for online purchases.

    

Are Boomers Ready to Share the Pain for the Common Good?

Each deficit-reduction proposal is full of serious ideas, and each is greeted by immediate and deadly sniper fire from both sides of the aisle.  Postponing action is irresistible because the political blowback from doing anything meaningful is scorching.  Every interest group is passionately committed to defending its own sacred cow, trampling the concept of sharing the pain for the common good. Washington, it appears, still isn't ready to grow up.

Those ringing the deficit alarm tend to be old and indignant.  Peter G. Peterson, the 84-year-old retired banker, invested $1 billion in a foundation focused on fixing budget deficits, foreign debt, and entitlement spending. He ruminates about the morality of a society that leaves a legacy of debt. "I have nine grandchildren," Peterson says.  "I think a lot about them."  Alan K. Simpson is 79.  The former Republican senator from Wyoming, who is co-chairman of President Obama's bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, says that he was too old to play budgetary politics anymore.  "We're not going to sign our names at this stage of life to a bunch of pap,"  Simpson says he told his co-chairman, Democrat Erskine Bowles, 65, the North Carolina businessman who served as White House Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton.  Says Simpson: "We call it the cruelty of making promises you can't keep."

Simpson and Bowles issued the first deficit-reduction proposal on Nov. 10, one week before former White House budget director Alice M. Rivlin, a 79-year-old Democrat, and Pete V. Domenici, 78, the former Republican senator from New Mexico, unveiled the recommendations of the Bipartisan Policy Center commission that they co-chair.  Letting deficits continue to run out of control, they warn, would "make us increasingly vulnerable to the dictates of our creditors, including nations whose interests may differ from ours."

There are a lot of ways for government to be cut.  True, but how deeply?   "If you want to do it all on the spending side under current law you'd have to constrain spending so it doesn't grow at all for the entire decade," says Gene Steuerle, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington.

Yet, politicians are unrealistic in attempting to shield completely the entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that represent about 40 percent of federal spending.  The task quickly becomes impossible as the Baby Boomer Generation retires.

Balancing the budget isn't just an accounting exercise.  It's about setting national priorities, weighing competing concepts of fairness, and creating incentives to promote growth. Cutting the budget in a way that simply off-loads costs onto states, localities, businesses, or families doesn't do Americans as a group any good.  It's taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another.  The benefits come when spending and taxation policies induce greater efficiency, and when they stimulate investment for future prosperity as opposed to consumption.

The road block seems to be Washington won't grow up until America's Boomers do.

Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, November 22, 2010

Boomers and Medicare

The 2010 election has been termed the “revolt of the middle class.”   But it might more accurately be called the revolt of the retired.

This time, senior citizens went for Republicans by a twenty-one-point margin.  The impact of that swing was magnified by the fact that seniors, always pretty reliable midterm voters, were particularly fired up: nearly a quarter of the votes cast were from people over sixty-five.

Why were seniors so furious with the Democrats?  The weak economy and the huge deficits didn’t help, but retirees have actually been hit less hard by the financial crisis than other Americans.  The real sticking point was health-care reform, which the elderly didn’t like from the start.  While the Affordable Care Act was being debated, most seniors opposed it, and even after the law was passed Gallup found that sixty per cent of them thought it was bad.
Misinformation about “death panels” and so on had something to do with seniors’ hostility. But the real reason is that it feels to them as if health-care reform will come at their expense, since the new law will slow the growth in Medicare spending over the next decade.  It won’t actually cut current spending but between now and 2019 total Medicare outlays will be half a trillion dollars less than previously projected.  The idea that the government might try to restrain Medicare spending was enough to turn seniors against the bill.

Seniors think of Medicare as an “entitlement”—something that they have a right to because they paid for it, via Medicare taxes—and decry the new bill as a giveaway.  This is a myth: seniors today get far more out of Medicare than they ever put in, which means that their medical care is paid for by current taxpayers.  There’s nothing wrong with this: the U.S. is rich enough so that the elderly shouldn’t have to worry about having health insurance; before Medicare, roughly half of them didn’t have it.

The Democrats’ loss of support among the elderly was more a matter of economic fundamentals than of political framing.  If the economy were growing briskly, it’s unlikely that the health-care bill would have become so politically toxic.  And, with Republicans now looking to roll back parts of the bill, what happens to health care in the long term may depend a lot on what happens to the economy in the short term. 

Source: THE NEW YORKER, November 22, 2010  Read more at: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/11/22/101122ta_talk_surowiecki?printable=true#ixzz169saiDXg

Blogging Boomers Carnival #185

Check out what happening in the world of Baby Boomers at this week's carnival hosted by Fabulous After 40.

40 Million Boomer Women Plan Their Future

By Guest Author Elinor Ginzler

  I’m a “multi-tasker.”  Most women are, either by nature or necessity.  

However, there is one task many of us put on the back burner, and that’s planning for our own futures. When it comes to our home, health and finances, we like to be in control. Planning for long-term care is one of the smartest decisions we can make to stay in control of our future, but for many women, there is still a lot we don’t know about it.

 

 

Too many women think long-term care means a nursing home or an insurance policy. The truth is, it is so much more, including ensuring your home, community, health, finance and legal needs are met. That means help with transportation, shopping or personal needs or skilled medical care. It can also mean renovations to your home to make it safe and comfortable for you and even using new technologies to help you live your best possible life.

 

We’re living in a wonderful world where many women are enjoying longer lives. Women now outlive men by five years, and two-thirds of Americans over 85 are women. However, a women’s income is nearly 25 percent lower than that of their single male counterparts and one-fourth that of their married counterparts, making them less able to afford long-term care costs. And even if a woman never requires long-term care, a family member or friend probably will. Taking control of your future is the first step in planning for your long-term care needs.

 

Here are some easy steps you can take now to get started: First, make healthy choices to support an active lifestyle later, such as eating nutritiously and exercising regularly. Also, share your medical and financial wishes with your family and friends today. This puts you in control of important future life decisions and may help ease your loved ones’ uncertainty. Next, investigate how your home and community will serve your future lifestyle needs and goals. And finally, know the costs of long-term care options and how those expenses will be covered.

 

AARP can help you get a head start on meeting your future needs with free planning resources available through www.aarp.org/decide. These materials are available as part of its AARP’s Decide. Create. Share.^sm campaign, an effort launched with the support of three major nonprofit organizations focused on women:  AAUW, MANA- a National Latina Organization, and the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Focused mainly on the nearly 40 million boomer women, the campaign is a call-to-action to every woman from every background.  Through online tools and resources, local community events and a variety of media outreach, AARP and its collaborators are working to raise awareness of long-term care planning among women across the nation.

 

This is an important message to take to heart. Think about your future. There are many simple things you can do now that cost little or no money, so I encourage you to get started on thinking about the future you want by visiting www.aarp.org/decide.  

 

Elinor Ginzler is a national expert on independent living and aging issues. She currently serves as AARP's lead spokesperson on caregiving, housing, and mobility issues, including older drivers' safety.

Boomers Launch Ideas for Improving Their Communities

Civic Ventures just announced its new Launch Pad contest (http://launchpad.encore.org/), which is designed to discover five inspiring people 45 and over with ideas to improve their communities.  Each winner will receive $5,000 and resources and support from the www.Encore.org community to put his or her idea into action.   

Launch Pad is a project of Civic Ventures, a think tank on Baby Boomers, work and social purpose.  Civic Ventures runs The Purpose Prize to invest in social innovators over 60; works in a variety of ways to promote encore careers combining purpose, passion and a paycheck; and offers advice and resources for people seeking encore careers on www.Encore.org. 

Launch Pad contenders from around the country can submit their ideas on how they want to make a difference in their communities at http://launchpad.encore.org/ starting today through December 20. 

On January 17, 2011, Civic Ventures will name 25 Launch Pad semifinalists.  From January 17 through February 14, people will be invited to vote online for the idea they’d like to see realized.  

Contestants can submit ideas in the following Launch Pad categories: education, social services, environment, health care and helping others engage in encore careers.

The announcement of the Launch Pad contest follows last week's news of the 2010 Purpose Prize winners, 10 people over age 60 who are making extraordinary contributions in their encore careers. The Purpose Prize, an award of up to $100,000, is given annually to individuals who are using their experience and passion to tackle society’s biggest challenges. 

For more information on the Launch Pad contest, visit http://launchpad.encore.org/. 

Launch Pad and The Purpose Prize are supported by grants from The Atlantic Philanthropies and the John Templeton Foundation.

Boomers' Future Sex Life

At a time when almost every kind of physical intimacy is discussed with increasing candor, the erotic feelings of empty nesters, retirees and the residents of assisted-living centers remain a taboo subject, except in tiresome jokes about Viagra.

The problem with the advertisements for Viagra, Cialis, and their competitors is the image that they create of healthy intimacy for older people.  Despite the picture painted by television commercials for drugs that deal with erectile dysfunction, the majority of men, even in the oldest age groups, reported having little difficulty in that department.

There is nothing unusual or deviant about romance among older people.  If we have learned nothing else from the past half-century of personal freedom and experimentation, it is that we are profoundly sexual beings.  How we understand ourselves over the course of a lifetime is closely tied to our bodies and how we share our bodies with others, even when we're done reproducing.  The details may change with age, but our basic physical and psychological needs do not.

A growing body of research on aging suggests that many older Americans have satisfying sexual relationships well into their later years. The largest systematic study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007, involved just over 3,000 subjects. It found that, although sexual activity does decline with age, about half of individuals between the ages of 65 and 74 remain active, as do 26% of those between 75 and 85. Among those in this second group, 54% said that they had sex at least two or three times a month, and 23% reported relations with a partner at least once a week.

Keep in mind, too, that this is no small population.  According to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau, there were some 34 million Americans in these two groups (age 65 to 84) in 2010.  Twenty years from now, as the ranks of older Americans are swelled by aging Baby Boomers, that number is expected to grow to approximately 62 million.  And as we know, this will be a generation that has grown up more preoccupied with sex than perhaps any generation before it.

Why should sexuality be viewed any differently as we get older?  We simply need to adapt our attitudes and techniques.  It is a disservice to older people, as well as to those of us approaching those years, to view any form of safe sexual expression that persists into later life as anything but healthy.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2010

For more on the joys and challenges of today's Baby Boomer generation, visit Ann Harrison, founder of Contemporary Retirement Coaching and creator of the Retirement Detox Program, who is hosting this week's Blogging Boomer Carnival #184.

Congress, Health Care Reform & Boomers

by Guest Author Barbara O'Brien ([email protected])

As soon as Republicans knew they had won a majority of House seats in the midterm elections, GOP leaders vowed to repeal health care reform.  Can they do this?  And should they?

Frankly, chances that the health care reform bill could be repealed completely are remote, especially since such repeal would have to override President Obama's veto, and the Senate still has a Democratic majority.

House Republicans say they could refuse to provide funds in the budget to implement health care reform.  However, provisions of the law that will expand Medicaid and help subsidize private insurance won't kick in until 2014.  Until then, there's not much the House can do to the budget to stop health care reform from going forward, short of defunding the entire Health and Human Services department.

Congress might attempt to dismantle the bill piece by piece.  One provision that many people want to remove is the individual mandate, which will require most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a tax penalty.  This provision also kicks in in 2014, and it's one that Baby Boomers in particular will want to fight to keep.

Here's why: Beginning in 2014, private insurance companies will no longer be able to refuse to insure someone because of a pre-existing condition.  But without an individual mandate, there will be no incentive for younger and healthier people to purchase health insurance until the time comes when they need it.  This means those left in the insurance "risk pool" will be older, and that drives up the cost of insurance.

By the time we reach 50, nearly all of us have "pre-existing conditions."  Some of our conditions are common, and some are not -- mesothelioma, for example, is rarely diagnosed in patients younger than 50.  And without Medicare or other good insurance, mesothelioma treatment would be financially devastating.

But without the individual mandate requiring that healthier people share in the cost of insuring all of us, the health insurance premium bills for people aged 50 to 65 will be ruinous.

Of course, we can scrap health care reform entirely, of course, but keep in mind that if you lose your insurance before you reach Medicare age you may not be able to purchase insurance at all, at any price, if you have a pre-existing condition. 

How to Market to Boomers

by Guest Author Patsi Krakoff, Psy.D. ([email protected])

Something’s wrong with the way marketers are trying to reach people over 65.  I know this from personal experience.  I am learning new stuff about the brain all the time, and since I have one myself, older brains are particularly interesting to me.

If marketers don’t get wise to the way seniors perceive their marketing messages, they are in for a rude awakening.  Marketing to the older brain isn’t done by showing pictures of frail people, confused people, or trying to frighten them into buying stuff.

Wake up, folks. “Seniors,” doesn’t mean senile.  Older people aren’t all decrepit and stupid.  Not only that, but we’ve got more of the money, honey.

Let’s just take the young seniors, those Baby Boomers who are just coming of age now. The 44 million baby boomers are maturing rapidly, and represent the richest generational cohort in history.  In the US, they control 77% of all financial assets.  They use ½ of all credit cards, and spend 2½ times the per capita average on discretionary purchases.

The level of spending by those over 45 will soon exceed that of people between 18 and 39 by $1 trillion US.  Yet, despite these statistics, only 10 percent of all branded marketing target older consumers (Wolfe and Snyder, 2003).

I know that neither myself, my husband or any of my friends of similar ages are attracted to the way seniors are depicted in marketing messages.

Some of us don’t use a cane or a walker.  We actually play sports and even dress like younger peeps.

Here are a few facts about the older brain and how it likes to be marketed to.

As we age, the word-oriented left hemisphere of the brain overloads more easily. But the right brain’s ability to process visual images holds steady.

So companies should find that seniors are less attuned to rational, persuasive arguments and more influenced by an emotional, visual approach.  Marketers would be wise to appeal to older consumers’ rich networks of long-term memories and associations.

Memory: the ability for older brains to suppress distractions declines with age.  It is this factor that contributes to poorer memories in older people.  They are more overwhelmed by distractions.

What does this mean for marketing messages?

• Keep your messages obvious, direct, clean and uncluttered.
• Avoid multiple sensory stimulation and quick-time animations.
• Unlike their younger peers, older adults do not require quick flash snippets of material.

Older brains have better emotional thermostats.

• It’s effective to accentuate the positive instead of trying to get their attention with doom and gloom.
• Reinforce positive images of themselves and pleasant feelings.

Older brains are resilient.  Be broad and positive in your presentation of information. Resilient brains do not respond to scare tactics of scarcity or urgency.

What has been your experience with appealing to the mature consumer? … I’m talking about mature in the sense of years, not personalities.  As I always say, you can’t help getting older, but you can remain immature forever.

Boomers and the World of Unemployment

By Guest Author Saman Rahmanian, CEO and founder of Tischen

The Great Recession has dramatically changed the employment landscape in the U.S.  With thousands of talented boomers suddenly thrust into the unemployment line, the notion of job security has been forever altered in the eyes of the American workforce.

Many are wondering, “What good is company loyalty, if I still end up with a pink slip?” 

The idea of putting all of your eggs in one company’s basket may well be a thing of the past: the situation has given rise to one of the fastest-growing rates of self-employment and entrepreneurship our country has seen in recent history. 

Rather than depend on one company for their livelihood, enterprising workers are taking control of their own destiny, building successful freelance businesses by putting together a portfolio of clients and projects that can become a lucrative—and long-term—career path.