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Here's another reason why Generation X might resent Baby Boomers.
Typical Generation Xers now in their late 30s to late 40s saw their net worth drop by a larger proportion than older Americans during the financial crisis and came out of it less prepared for retirement than the post-World War II boomer generation, according to a new study.
Members of Generation X suffered losses amounting to 45% of median net worth between 2007 and 2010, a significantly higher percentage than those born in the 20 years immediately after the war, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts' economic mobility project.
Based on income and other projections, typical Gen Xers are on track to replace half of their pre-retirement income if they stop working at 65, the study finds. Boomers born between 1946 and 1955 look set to replace 82% of income. Later boomers, born between 1956 and 1965, are on track to replace 59%.
Gen Xers are "facing a genuine possibility of downward mobility, if they don't change course," says Erin Currier, who heads the mobility project.
The results indicate that Gen Xers might need to take steps such as saving more and borrowing less if they want to maintain their living standard in their golden years, experts say.
Most Baby Boomers (the cohort of Americans born between 1946 and 1964) believe that they will still be working during their retirement years as they move through the boomer retirement crisis.
Do you have arthritis, mental fog, aches, pains, lack energy or difficulty sleeping? Rather than suffering from age related conditions, in reality, you may have a reversible condition.
Doctors call this condition chronic, unintentional dehydration. A better description is the nursing diagnoses of fluid and electrolyte imbalance.
As we age, our thirst perception is impaired. We may think we are not thirsty yet the above symptoms are a few of the many cries for water our body makes.
The solution to rehydrate is easy, simply drink more water and take in more salt, but only the right kind of salt. The salt helps the water get inside all of our cells where it can do the most good.
The Great Salt Shake Up
You may constantly hear salt is bad for heath. Yet journals like Science, American Journal of Hypertension and JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) have all published research showing the opposite.
JAMA reported there was no strong proof that reducing salt intake will reduce the risk of heart attack, strokes, or death for those with normal or high blood pressure.
A European study even found that those who ate less salt had an increased risk of dying from heart disease.
The evidence of salt being associated with heart disease is weak. More importantly, the evidence is all base on iodized table salt.
Refined table salt is 97.5 percent sodium chloride. The balance is man-made chemicals like anti-caking agents such as ferrocyanide and aluminosilicate.
Instead of table salt, switch to unprocessed sea salt. It is about 85% sodium chloride and the remaining 15% is made up of naturally occurring trace minerals. These minerals are essential for health.
The Solution to Your Health Challenges
As long as you do not have kidney disease, salt intolerance or you are not under a doctors care, try the water cures protocol tonight.
For better sleep tonight, drink a glass of water. Once down, put a pinch of sea salt in your mouth and let it dissolve.
On awaking, do the opposite. Put a pinch of unprocessed sea salt in your mouth and dissolve it totally. Then drink a glass of water. Drink it all at once, don't nurse it. Preferably, drink it within 20 min of getting up and 1/2 hour before you eat breakfast.
Good health to you and yours. For more info, go to ....http:/www.WaterCures.org
Jonathan Steele, RN has a career that has taken him from hospital nurse, high tech pediatric nurse, hospice and now holistic nurse. Having used holistic health treatments in the hospital for over a decade, he is now in private practice. His specialities are pain elimination, anemia management and memory enhancement.
By Guest Author Judy Bitterli, Senior Vice President of Marketing for AVG: the free antivirus software provider.
This is not about resume writing, networking or Monster.com. This is about the right frame of mind if you are over fifty and looking for a job and some everyday technology which can help.
During the past few years, I have witnessed some amazing job interviews by people over fifty and sadly observed many dismal failures. Here are five tips to make sure your skills shine through:
Get your head in the right place. Remind yourself, this is not about you. This is about what you can offer the company. No one owes “boomers” anything. Start with a mental list of what you would bring to the company and keep the list succinct and ready. Then, learn everything you can about them. If the company is public, read their annual report. If they are private read their press clippings.
Show up with energy. No, I’m not talking about hitting up Starbucks. What I mean is that you need to convey you can still “hang” through the hours and have intensity. Simple things like sitting up straight and speaking with conviction will hit this. Also, practice at home. Practice standard interview questions with your friends and record them on your phone. Playback. Practice. Playback. Practice. How you sound may surprise you but by using this tool you’ll get a head start and make a great impression.
Relax and Smile. People want a coworker who is a pleasure to be around. If you make the experience stressful, you’re less likely to be hired. Create a music play list for that last half hour before an interview. Make sure it’s happy music that keeps you relaxed. Or try an app like Simply Being to get in touch with your inner Zen. But don’t get so relaxed you fall asleep. Pre-install extreme Alarm Clock just in case.
Convey passionabout the opportunity. Frame this job as a calling, but don’t go over the top. Tell them why it gets you out of bed every day. Whatever it is from answering a phone to driving a bus. Be passionate about the position.
Start off with the question, “What skills are you looking for in the person you hire for this position?” It creates a conversation and gives you time to frame your skills around the requirements.
Make sure you express no technology gaps, are proficient on Microsoft Office, have an up to date LinkedIn profile that matches your resume and recommendations on your LinkedIn account. When putting together your resume, make sure it’s in a file format accessible to all computers, such as a PDF or Word document saved in a .doc format. And scan that resume with your antivirus software before you send along to ensure it isn’t blocked by your Internet Service Provider or a company’s firewall system.
Baby Boomers continue to personally evolve; setting new trends along their wake. This carnival, the 307th of the BBC series, is just a small piece of the microcosm series that was developed to record the boomer generation's evolution.
Come to the fair and observe interesting segments of trend-setting happenings that seek life's meaning through passionate living. Be sure to visit SoBabyBoomer's tent at the Blogging Boomer Carnival #307 is hosted this week by Rita Robison of The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide.
I just finished reading the latest book in M. B. Tosi's wonderful The Indian Path Series - it's The Crimson Path of Honor and I absolutely loved it. My review sums it up:
"The Crimson Path of Honor, the third of The Indian Path Series by M. B. Tosi, takes us back in time where a spoiled young woman raised in Boston discovers her fearless courage and life signature through learning the ways of a squaw while being known as 'Morning Star'.
"A white woman assimilating within a Native American culture, while the destruction of the Indian way of life was happening across the continent, is a theme of The Indian Path Series and is of interest to many Americans. As one who has traced his heritage back to the marriage of a Mohawk woman and a Dutchman in the 1600s, I especially appreciate these cultural-clashing stories that M. B. Tosi weaves."
~John G. Agno, certified executive & business coach and president of Signature, Inc., a leadership development firm located in Ann Arbor, MI.
The language is beautiful, her descriptions perfection, the plot is exciting and enduring and the characters unfold before you like enchanting flowers. You'll thrill at the forbidden love that blossoms between the beautiful blond woman and the handsome Indian chief - a can't miss - read it now! And when you order the book, you'll download as a bonus her previous in the series, The Secret Path of Destiny. What a gift! http://bit.ly/CrPath
Lawrence Rybka, CEO of ValMark Securities, a wealth-advisory firm, says his firm won’t sell the new insurers’ annuities, in part because the providers’ financial-strength ratings from A.M. Best, a credit-rating company that focuses on the insurance industry, aren’t high enough. His Akron-based company’s liability insurance won’t pay for his defense if he’s sued by a client who buys an annuity from a company with less than an A rating that later fails, he says.
With a typical annuity, a customer hands over her retirement nest egg to an insurance company in exchange for a promised future stream of payments. The insurer invests the money and gets to keep any earnings beyond what’s guaranteed to the policyholder. If the bets backfire and the insurance company fails, some losses may be borne by customers and state guarantee funds, Rybka said. “The long-term interests of policyholders are not in alignment with the short-term interests of private equity,” Rybka says. “It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose game.”
Until April 2011, Patrick “Pete” Dodd, a former money manager at Liberty Life Insurance in Greenville, S.C., invested customer premiums in what he calls a “squeaky clean” portfolio: bonds backed by state governments and blue chip corporations. Then Athene Holding, a company funded by private equity firm Apollo Global Management (APO), acquired Liberty and changed its investment strategy. Now the unit’s holdings include securities backed by subprime mortgages, time-share vacation homes, and a railroad in Kazakhstan. “When you look at the business model these guys use, where they’re substantially increasing the risk in the bond portfolio, sooner or later, in my opinion, that has to come home to roost,” says Dodd, who helped manage $4 billion before the sale to Athene.
Wall Street firms such as Apollo, Goldman Sachs Group (GS), Harbinger Group (HRG), and Guggenheim Partners are acquiring life insurance companies that specialize in retirement savings products known as fixed annuities. They’re shaking up a staid industry with investments in everything from the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team to the kind of mortgage-backed securities that cratered during the financial crisis.
The newcomers are meeting resistance from some state insurance regulators, accustomed to plain-vanilla portfolios, who have warned about exposing policyholders to greater risk. “Their focus is on maximizing their immediate financial returns, rather than ensuring that promised retirement benefits are there at the end of the day for policyholders,” Benjamin Lawsky, New York State superintendent of financial services, said in a speech on April 18.
The money managers say their investments are no more dangerous than those of traditional insurers and that they’re managing them with a long-term view. While some of Athene’s investments are unorthodox, “our portfolio is less risky than traditional life-insurance companies,” says Bermuda-based Chief Executive Officer James Belardi.
Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, April 29, 2013
Best of Boomer Blogs #306
Baby Boomers continue to personally evolve; setting new trends along their wake. This is the 306 of the BBB series and just a small piece of the microcosm series that was developed to record the boomer generation's evolution.
Come and observe interesting segments of trend-setting happenings that seek life's meaning through passionate living. Be sure to visit SoBabyBoomer's tent at the Best of Boomer Blogs #306 hosted this week by Katie Gustafson Foster at Arabian Tales and Other Amazing Adventures. Katie Foster is a freelance writer and photographer based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates whose main interests include travel, culture, fashion, food and wine.
Most of us are aware that there are two types of old these days. There is Baby-Boomer old, an audacious, aspirational sort of old. Common depictions include couples sky-diving for their 40th anniversaries; Richard Branson doing all manner of macho rich-guy nonsense; and the woman of a certain age on a seashore holding a fluttering piece of voile toward the winds of freedom.
Then there is old old, a realm often belonging to the parents of the baby boomers. This is nursing-home old. This is prunes-for-breakfast old. This is “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up” old.
It would be easy to make the mistake of thinking new interest in the aged exists simply because the boomers, still the largest generation in the Western Hemisphere, are now careering into seniorhood. But it’s worth remembering that, notwithstanding their aging, the boomers are still the generation that gave us the famous boardroom credo “Nobody wants to see old people on TV/in the movies/in advertisements.” “The Golden Girls” was what it meant to be acceptably ancient on prime time. Rue McClanahan was a fit 51 when she took the role of Blanche Devereaux on that show.
So it’s not the new old who are driving this fascination. It’s the young.
It is from this cultural interstice that Betty White’s late-career renaissance was made possible. The White phenomenon can be cast largely as a youth-culture one; something that never would have happened if it weren’t for the 2010 Facebook petition, driven by under-30s, asking White to host “Saturday Night Live.” Today White fits in a truly novel category of fame: a giant star with cult cachet among people who could be her great-grandchildren.
The twilight years thus appeal as a time when a kind of paradoxical freedom can be located, a time thought to be beyond the petty concerns of hotness and coolness, where you can finally, truly, really be yourself.
Today, college graduations, weddings, 30th birthday parties, Christenings, brises — these sorts of events are regularly blessed with multiple Grannies, Papas, Yiayias, Zaides, Nanas, Nonnas, Omas, Abuelitos. They stand up; they take bows. In the true fabric of experience, this is not some invisible stitching.
Source: The New York Times Magazine, April 28, 2013
They may have been known as the MTV Generation or sometimes "the slackers," when they first started entering the workforce more than 25 years ago, but members of Generation X (Gen X, those born between 1965 and 1976) are now as affluent, stable and saddled with responsibility as their parents were at the same age.
A new study from the MetLife Mature Market Institute, The MetLife Study of Generation X: The MTV Generation Moves into Mid-Life, reports that 70% of Gen Xers live with a spouse or partner. They have an average of 2.5 children and 82% own their own homes, though 17% of those report that the value of those homes is less than the debt attached to them. Forty-three percent have remained in the same type of career throughout their working years and just more than 40% have been with the same employer for 10 years or more. 75% are working full or part-time. Most are part of a dual-earner household.
Now approaching or in middle age, Gen Xers are part of the sandwich generation because many are caring for both their children and their parents. 10% are grandparents. The economy has not been too tough on the group, now aged 36 to 47. Just 19% earn less than $35,000 per year and fully 29% earn more than $100,000. They are arguably better educated than any generation before them-43% graduated from college. Only 50% say they are behind on their retirement savings; they have relatively high ownership rates of 401K plans (66%).
"The Gen Xers have suffered from the 'Marcia, Marcia, Marcia' syndrome since they've been compared with The Brady Bunch daughter, Jan, the frequently unnoticed middle child," said Sandra Timmermann, Ed.D., director of the MetLife Mature Market Institute. "Because they followed the Baby Boomers, it took a while for them to make their mark. That was also due to the fact that they're small in number - just 50 million compared to 77 million boomers - and entered the workforce later than their predecessors."
The moniker Generation X originated in the 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland (St. Martin's Press). At the time, the group was perceived as unfocused 20-somethings, lacking drive and taking an extraordinarily long time to grow up. They were the first to be associated with the term, "emerging adulthood" because they were thought to have put off being fully self-sufficient until their late 20s.
The GenXers grew up in the 1980's and 90's listening to Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. They spent their childhood and adolescence watching MTV and The Cosby Show and, identified with the characters in the movies, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Fully 46% were latch-key children whose parents both went to work.
Other aspects of Generation X revealed in the study include the following:
The majority (63%) of Gen Xers still have both parents living and almost two in 10 regularly provide care for their aging parent(s).
Almost six in 10 Gen Xers report they include exercise in their daily routines.
Approximately 20% have never been married.
70% of Gen Xers are not confident that Social Security will be there to provide benefits when they retire.
Most would like to retire at age 62, but believe working until at least age 67 is inevitable.
Many Gen Xers identify as Baby Boomers.
Two in ten Gen Xers have been married more than once.
On average, Gen Xers own about four financial products, with those in higher income brackets much more likely to own more products.
Methodology
The nationally representative survey for The MetLife Study of Generation X: The MTV Generation Moves into Mid-Life was conducted by GfK Custom Research North America on behalf of the MetLife Mature Market Institute between November 29, 2012 and December 19, 2012. A total of 1,000 interviews were completed by phone - respondents were all born between the years of 1965 and 1976. Data were weighted by demographics to reflect the total Gen X population.
It was only a few months ago -- in a packed ballroom at the world's largest investment conference with attendees on the edge of their seats -- that Prechter overturned several of the most widespread investment myths.
In turn, he provided the evidence-based alternative for market causality.
Only the few hundred people who sat in that room have seen this presentation -- until now.
If you mistrust the conventional notions that markets are always efficient, investors are always rational and prices always reflect value, give Prechter 23 minutes of your time.
In those 23 minutes, you will discover …
How events like 9/11 and the Enron scandal have a relationship to markets that is shockingly different than what you think.
The surprising link between interest rates and stocks.
Inflation and deflation's impact on hard money.
Central bankers' supposed power to turn trends.
What new data says about the long-term viability of investment models based on earnings and value.
And more, including the secret force that drives the decisions of futures traders, investment advisors, money managers, hedge fund managers and economists.
The video is free, and it's just a couple of clicks away. Find a quite location, and watch it now.
About the Publisher, Elliott Wave International Founded in 1979 by Robert R. Prechter Jr., Elliott Wave International (EWI) is the world's largest market forecasting firm. Its staff of full-time analysts provides 24-hour-a-day market analysis to institutional and private investors around the world.
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