Expect whining: The Boomers in Retirement

McKinsey did a study (free registration required) of the impact of retiring baby boomers in November 2007. As one might expect, the report is brimming with factoids. The ones that jumped out at me:

• 60 percent of the boomers won’t be able to maintain a lifestyle close to their current one without continuing to work.
• The same percentage of older boomers already suffers from chronic health problems.
• 43 percent already are frustrated that they aren’t leading the lives they expected.

But society will not be able to ignore their (our – I just scraped into the category) whining. More factoids:

• Boomers will control nearly 60 percent of US net wealth in 2015 (see Exhibit 2).
• There will be more than 45 million households with people from 51 to 70 years old, compared with about 25 million for the “silent” generation, born from 1925 to 1945.
• Their real disposable income and consumption will be roughly 40 percent higher.

Doing a Rumsfeldian analysis of knowns and unknowns, 24 million boomers have not prepared for retirement (this excludes 11 million plain disadvantaged, and 10 million affluent); of these, 13 million know they’re unprepared, but 11 million don’t know they’re unprepared (Exhibit 3).

Guess who’ll be demanding a bail-out of their own in 2015, just as we’re (hopefully) getting over the current one?