Do you know who elects our political leaders? By percentage, the group most likely to vote is senior citizens over 65. Often the turnout among seniors is a whopping 70 percent. It's not hard to understand why senior citizens turn out in droves to vote. They have more time to focus on issues and to actually go to the polls. They also have enormous lobbies, like the AARP that stress the importance of voting and strive to make members aware of issues affecting them.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” You no doubt recognize the quote from John F. Kennedy. The attitude behind those famous words inspired many people over the years to become volunteers in some capacity.
Today’s senior citizens were young adults when Kennedy made that speech, which may explain why, through the years, their generation has been big on volunteerism, and currently holds the record for sheer numbers of volunteers. Just below them on the generational timeline is the Baby Boomers. There may be more seniors who volunteer, but Boomers hold the current record for the most hours contributed.
If you’re a Baby Boomer in your late 40s, or early 50s and you know your retirement savings are not on track, don’t despair. And don’t abandon your savings goals. You’ll still be able to put away a significant amount of money, but you’ll have to get serious about the process.
Start by calculating how much you need to have when you retire and how much you have saved. Don’t succumb to the temptation to avoid this task because you're afraid to find out you're not in the ballpark. You’ll be surprised how motivating it can be to learn the answer.
This is not your father’s working world anymore. If your parents are like many who are now senior citizens, they took jobs that paid fairly well and offered decent pensions, and stuck with those jobs forever, whether they were happy or not. It was not uncommon for a man or woman to work 35 or 40 years in a job or field that had long since lost its appeal. That’s what our parents did, maybe because they were raised by parents of the Depression years who were afraid to take chances.
If you’re a Baby Boomer, you’re on the home stretch with at most, a couple of decades left in your working life. More than ever before, now is not the time to fumble the financial ball and endanger your future with devastating financial blunders. Here are some errors you should avoid.
TAGS: Full Comment, FC Abroad November 21, 2008, 2:00 PM Kelly McParland: Somebody pass the dog food; boomers are tapped out by Kelly McParland TAGS: Full Comment, Kelly McParland November 21, 2008, 12:56 PM Kevin Libin: Make Ottawa pay the
Ridge Title Agency covers them all.' Though commercial lending is slower at this time, reverse mortgages by baby boomers and senior citizens are on the rise, as well as mortgages for first-time homebuyers, according to Sciore. 'Yes, the news of
Are they worlds apart, or do they just have a different definition of 'career'? As the Baby Boomers prepare to collect their gold watches and exit the workplace, Generation Y enters. But they're not waiting for a watch. Why should they? They tell time by
the 1920s gave the city its charming, Victorian-style Hyde Park suburb, now a gentrified redoubt for the baby boomers just across the Hillsborough River from downtown. Today's downtown skyline is the product of the 1980s and 1990s booms, when banks built
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