As I near my 35th birthday, I reflect on the years that have brought me here and the years I have in front of me. I am, I hate to admit, a millennial. By two years. Millennials are defined by those born between 1981 and 1991. Millennials face a unique challenge when it comes to retirement savings.
As the article below states, almost half of working millennials do not have an employer-sponsored retirement plan. In addition, only 10% have a defined benefit plan, read pension. So, what do we, as financial advisors, do with this information?
The article highlights a company that is selling annuities to a younger clientele. They are selling smaller annuities throughout their millennial clients’ accumulation years, building a personal pension for them by the time they retire. This is not a bad idea; however, to make a living out of this business model, an advisor would have to have a huge number of clients. So let’s think about it a different way.
Prior to Millennials, Baby Boomers were the generation with the biggest population and the most wealth. Baby Boomers are the wealthiest generation for a couple of reasons. They have received and are receiving the largest share of Social Security, more of them have company pensions, and they have a lower cost of living. How we need to look at this is not a battle of the generations, but rather, how do we continue to do business with a different generation of wealth accumulators and, eventually, retirees? The Baby Boomer to Millennial wealth transfer will be the largest wealth transfer in the history of our country and you can position yourself as an advisor of a new generation of retirees.
Millennials will need to save in a number of different ways to create a retirement income that resembles the retirement incomes of generations prior. Whether it is a tax free income strategy through cash value life insurance, an incremental build of a personal pension, or a transfer of wealth, that will result in a big portion of Millennials’ retirement savings.
Don’t sleep on the “lazy” generation. If you are not marketing to them, someone else will. Give your Tarkenton Financial marketer a call today to find out how you can market to this financially under-served generation.
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