Retirement Income Redesigned: Master Plans for Distribution: An Adviser's Guide for Funding Boomers' Best Years

Chapter 1. Boomers: A Force for Change

deena b. katz

When Time magazine offered to extend my subscription for a discounted rate it was making available only to "senior citizens," I was truly puzzled. Don't get me wrong, I was pleased to receive 85 percent off the cover price, but there had to be some mistake. This offer certainly couldn't be for me. A "senior citizen" is a blue haired grandma who reads Reader's Digest in the morning and eats the local Denny's early-bird special every night. That's not my routine. It's true I'm midway through my fifth decade, but I'm hardly a senior citizen. In fact, applied to me, I find the term offensive. And so would other baby boomers.

I'm a full-fledged boomer, having made my initial appearance in 1950. There are 77 million of us born between 1946 and 1964. Boomers are the products of a postwar global phenomenon that started abruptly and ended the same way. For most people the term "boomer" conjures up rebellious, protesting hippies of the 19960s, who became the materialistic über-consumers of the 1990s.

A 1 -year span separates the vanguard boomers of the late 1940s and the later boomers of the early 1960s. When the early boomers were staging protests, the late boomers were barely into grade school; nevertheless, society tends to view us as a monstrous homogenous cohort. We're not. Yes, we're big, but we're diverse—in lifestyle, experiences, and values.

Our connection is not a shared lifestyle but rather a shared legacy: we inherited, encountered, ...