Friday, May 4, 2007

Baby boomer retirements hanging over our heads

It's inevitable that my thinking about investing and investments also be tied up with the concept of retirement. That's because I'm facing retirement in the not too distant future. Also, because so are about 78 million of my fellow baby boomers.

It's very unlikely that we'll treat old age the same as our parents.

Based on the expectation that baby boomers will begin selling stocks at age 65 to meet their retirement expenses, a lot of people expect stocks to go into a long bear market starting roughly 2009 or 2010. I'm not so sure the moment will be a dramatic, for several reasons.

It's unlikely every baby boomer who turns 65 will immediately sell all their stocks and go into bonds.

Not all baby boomers will turn 65 at the same time. When the first bunch hit 65, there'll still be many millions of us who are not yet 65, and still buying up stocks for our retirement funds.

From what I read, people who want their resources to last for the rest of their life, should not sell off more 4% of their assets in a year. Baby boomers following that advice will not immediately sell everything right away.

Many baby boomers will simply switch jobs and careers to something they enjoy doing, and so will delay having to live on investments.

A few of us plan to hang on to income-generating investments for the rest of our lives. Why sell stocks that are paying out good dividends? I don't want to live on the total yield generated by selling off shares of stock. Then I'd have to pay too much money to the government in capital gains taxes. I want to live dividends that keep growing every year




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