Big Chill -- 'Late Boomers' Seen as Least Prepared for Retirement

May 12, 2010— -- Nanci Pipo, a partner at investment advisory Southtowns Financial, finds herself answering a lot of questions about retirement planning these days. There's one group of people in particular who seem to be most in need of counsel from this small, Orchard Park, N.Y.-based firm just south of Buffalo.

"Folks who have just turned 50, or about to turn 50, they are the ones who are really starting to feel stressed out," Pipo said. "They are looking at their 401(k) nest eggs and other retirement savings accounts and realizing that it's simply not enough."

Pipo is referring to a sub-segment of the American population sometimes called the "Late Boomers."

They are, in some ways, a generation betwixt and between, too young to attend Woodstock, too old to be slackers. However, these late boomers, born in the late 1950s and early 1960s, may have the worst possible timing when it comes to retirement planning.

According to a recent study from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, 48 percent of late boomers are at risk of being unprepared for retirement, or, put another way, of being unable to maintain their current standard of living after they stop working. That compares to 41 percent of "Early Boomers," the first wave of the boomers born in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Members of the so-called Generation X, who were born between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, are seen as being even less prepared for retirement than late boomers. Some 56 percent of Gen-X members are thought to be insufficiently prepared for retirement, according to the study. However, this segment of the workforce has more time to catch up to the late boomers, according to the study's coauthor, CRR director Alicia Munnell.

"Late boomers did not benefit as much from the main bull market (1982-2000) as did the early boomers," Munnell explained. "But they got hit just as hard in the recent financial crisis."