Baby Boomers Consistently Neglect Financial Planning
Recent research by the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) demonstratest that one out of three baby boomers who are approaching or commencing the retirement stage are yet to do any financial planning in the past two years.
The recent survey reveals that baby boomers are only somewhat ahead of the millennials when it has to do with retirement planning. Over 50% of millennials and members of Generation X, also more than one-third of baby boomers, haven’t commenced retirement planning, according to the NAPFA study. Over one-third of millennials and Gen Xers refuse to believe they’ll ever be ready to retire.
Critical Analysis of Baby Boomers Opposing Retirement
37% of boomers have not considered their options for retiring; 1 in 3 don’t think they’ll ever be able to retire; 16% don’t know how much money they need to retire; 21% say $1 million to $2 million sounds about right.
A minority percentage of baby boomers said that “grim is the word they associate with retirement — more than one third said the word is “joy” according to Market Watch.
“I was surprised at the small number of baby boomers who said they thought they would feel financially prepared for retirement,” said Lauren Zangardi Haynes, a fee-only financial planner at Spark Financial Advisors in Richmond, VA.
The Provision of Certified Financial Planner (CFP) Certification
Experts have long recommended hiring an adviser who holds the CFP classification. However, last summer The Wall Street Journal shook things up by asserting that the CFP Board neglected to correctly vet thousands of CFP professionals’ regulatory, disciplinary and criminal history.
In response, the CFP Board stated it would discontinue relying mainly on self-disclosure to assess an adviser’s regulatory record. Moreover, over 86,000 certificate holders would undergo an annual background check of the information that is made available publicly, including the FINRA BrokerCheck profiles and the SEC’s IAPD database.
In a recent meeting with WealthManagement.com, Jack Brod, the new director of the CFP Board, declared his top preference was discussing the proposals, presented in November, by a self-governing task force led by securities consultant and past Texas Securities Commissioner Denise Voigt Crawford, which was discovered following the statement by The Wall Street Journal.
This is all good news. But it remains critical that investors do their own proper diligence and investigate an adviser’s biography at Brokercheck.org, a website run by FINRA which provides a report about any licensed broker or investment adviser. It includes their job history, securities license and whether they’ve ever been disciplined by FINRA or the Securities and Exchange Commission. A large number of investors that fail to use the BrokerCheck encounter scams that may eventually develop into FINRA lawsuits.
