Boomers Give Florida Cold Shoulder

Here’s a not so far from the truth In-Search-Of ad in a Florida newspaper:

FOXY LADY: Sexy, fashion-conscious blue-haired beauty, 80’s, slim, 5’4” (used to be 5’6”), searching for sharp looking, sharp dressing companion. Matching white shoes and belt a plus.

But the joke may be on Flordia, because boomers are looking elsewhere for retirement havens. For more than 50 years, retiring New Yorkers found Florida was their top destination. Now...not so much. In 2005, Florida accounted for 35 percent of New York’s net migration loss. In 2009, that share dropped to 11 percent, according to the Empire Center for New York State Policy [link here]. Where are New Yorkers heading if it’s not Florida? Try North Carolina.

What’s the story? More competition mostly. Other states are doing a lot more to lure retirees to their locales. But the biggest factor may be that boomers have loss equity and assets due to the meltdown and must now explore less expensive retirement options --- if they can afford to move anywhere.

Even if their stock portfolio has empty recovered somewhat, a lot of boomers may opt to stay put. Part of the equation is shrinking home values. If your house isn’t worth what it used to be and your savings have a dent in them, staying put may be the more attractive option. Add to that the fact that many boomers would like to remain close to family and friends, and you have a compelling case for nixing the whole retirement-in-the-sun scenario.

The new retirement paradigm may be to keep the house you’re in and take vacations or multi-month respites in warm locales. A note of caution though: if you drive in Florida be on the lookout for Herman.

As a senior citizen was driving down the freeway, his car phone rang.

Answering, he heard his wife's voice urgently warning him,

"Herman, I just heard on the news that there's a car going the wrong way on 280. Please be careful!"

"Hell," said Herman, "it's not just one car. It's hundreds of them!"

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.

What? There’s No Forever 61?

In a recent post for Northern Life Canada site, Kate Forgach offers advice to baby boomers on how to dress.

I think we’ve all observed some boomers who must not own a mirror, or if they do own one, they must not walk by it before leaving the house. If they did take a good look at themselves, they might notice that they look ridiculous, or worse, highly unattractive in the clothes they wear.

Age appropriate clothing should be the norm, but as Forgach points out in her post, there is no Forever 61 store at the mall. Still, it amazes me how often you see boomers trying to dress like they did 40 years ago, or trying to wear the same styles as their sons and daughters. Gravity has seen to it that the flat abs are gone, replaced by descending pot bellies, so the tighter the clothing, the more unflattering the net effect is.

Forgach suggests that lady boomers forego the Daisy Dukes cut-offs and concentrate instead on tailored looks that are neither too tight or too frumpy. Her best line about decolletage is “many manufacturers are cutting tops so low you can see the Alps in one quick glance.” She also suggests you avoid the Granny Arms effect by avoiding sleeveless tops unless you have some really buff upper arms.

For men, the advice is to cool it on the stove pipe legs or the high waisted mommy jeans. Forgach thinks some tees are okay, but I’ve seen boomers in all-over graphics tees that look so absurd that you want shake them and explain that that ship/shirt look has sailed.

Finally, in the footwear segment, Forgach scores big points with me by nixing some footwear that I’d like to ban as well. “Two no-nos: Bedazzled Crocs and sandals with socks (unless you work in a food coop).”

Wardrobes are so casual now (think sweatsuits at the mall) that my theory is that it just might be the cool thing to dress up instead of dressing down. Most boomers are going to look a lot better in tailored slacks than they would even in Levis classic jeans. And I’ve also observed that aging bodies look better in button front shirts that hide a multitude of upper torso soft spots. Next time you’re out in a crowd, notice how a man wearing a sportcoat over a tee shirt looks better than the guy in a plain tee and jeans.

Final advice from most experts: Get out of whatever decade you’re stuck in and freshen up your style. It has to be better than what you’ve been wearing up until now.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.

Make Up Your Mind!

Are boomers going to kill the stock market or create great investment opportunities? Or is the answer both?

Financial analysts (where do you go to school for that job?) are warning that as boomers hit retirement, there will be a big sell-off as they liquidate their assets. This could, in turn, put a dent in stock prices.

I’m no analyst or stock expert (phew!), but it seems to me that the stock market seems to tank on rumors of anything (Greece default, gloomy Fed forecasts, take your pick), so the prospect of boomer asset liquidation seems like just one more lame excuse for depressed stock prices.

But the real flaw in the boomer asset liquidation prognostications is that analysts actually believe that there are a lot of boomers out their who are in any position to retire. The anecdotal evidence I can collect is that a big batch of boomers are nowhere near ready to retire and won’t be liquidating any assets anytime soon unless it’s due to an underwater mortgage or loss of a job.

Another flaw? As boomers start leaving the stock market (and I concur that they will eventually, albeit not in the stampede some are predicting), the depressed stock prices mean that the liquidated assets will be substantially lower in value than a retiree would have.

But fear not. Even the analysts are quick to point out the silver lining in lower stock prices is that younger generations will be able to afford to buy bluechip stocks. In other words, our loss is their gain. Wow, that is good news! It’s always good to know that someone can profit from a down market.

Sad to say, we may be looking at a years-long (as in 3 or 4) economic recovery, and that means we will all be working longer and retiring later. If we still have jobs.

Am I the only one that thinks a ouija board has more chance of being right on which way the market is moving?

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.

Brain Drain

Guess what? For all the bad mouthing of baby boomers, business and industry need to know what’s in our brains. That’s right, they need us, they really need us.

Er, they need what’s in our brains. Recent articles in business magazines point to a knowledge vacuum as a serious consequence of the exit of baby boomers. Around 900,000 white color workers will be retiring from the executive branch of government. While the make up 40% of the total workforce, boomers fill more than half the management positions and half the professionals such as doctors and lawyers. One article in Business Week went so far as to list 8 steps companies can take to deal with this intelligence attrition.

So, how do they mine our brains to extract our valuable knowledge? They need us to share the rules of engagement. Boomers are documenting their rationales for client/customer relations so that the next generation can pick it up. Creating a database to establish where the most valuable competencies reside in the organization is another step, and creating a database to collect valuable information goes along with it. It’s also recommended that organizations create a home for the esoteric information that may seem non-essential (until the day comes when you need it). Bridge building between generations may seem obvious, but a lot of companies ignore it at their peril. Some of the best information exchanges occur when boomers are working as a team with the next generation of managers. Social media is another way to get information exchanged, allowing retirees to participate as well in the mining of useful knowledge.

Taking these steps is not just a one time fix for business and industry, but a strategy for the future in which each generation hands off what they know to the next.

Successful businesses will be proactive enough in this effort to guarantee the succession of knowledgeable leadership. Boomers are by no means irreplacable, but companies that don’t mine our skills and competencies will be whistling into the wind when we’re gone. Just try wetting your lips to do that.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.

Das Verkkampers

Traveling across America, taking a job here, a job there. Meeting new people and finding adventure in unexpected places. If it all sounds like the original network pitch for the TV series Route 66, it may come as a surprise that it’s the life many baby boomers are leading these days.

Boomers call it “workamping” and its popularity is growing among retirees. Instead of driving Corvettes, these workampers are piloting recreational vehicles and exchanging their labor for a place to park the beast.

My first exposure to workamping occurred many years ago in Death Valley. Hundreds of RVs dotted the outskirts of town and many of the owners worked in the gift shops, gas stations, motels and the National Park. In May, when the temperatures rose to unbearable heights, the RVs would roll out of town like a massive butterfly migration.

The fact is that many retirees cannot afford to take off for a six months or a year without supplemental income. Workamping allows them to travel around the country, see the places they’ve always wanted to visit, and find the temporary employment they need to finance their travel.

Summertime is the easiest season to find work. The Army Corp of Engineers hires temps, and there are loads of seasonal jobs at amusement parks, water parks, and the service industries that surround popular tourist destinations. The jobs pay minimum wage to $12 an hour, and sometimes workampers work in return for a campsite with water and electricity.

When Todd and Buzz drove the Vette around the country, issues such as health care, taxes, licensing and registrations never seemed to crop up. Workampers, on the other hand, have to figure out what state to claim as a domicile and how to get their mail forwarded to wherever they are taking up temporary residence. It can get sticky, but not insurmountable, and thousands of workampers manage just fine.

So, how many boomers are out on the roads in their RVs? No one really knows, but if you go online and look at the proliferation of websites devoted to full-time RV living, it looks like more and more boomers are joining the ranks of the workampers. There’s Cheap RV Living, RV Dreams, RV Life and Travel, Workamper News, and too many personal workamper blogs to mention.

The big question for those considering the workamper lifestyle is how long can you call the road “home?” Living in cramped quarters and taking some not so great minimum wage jobs can take its toll. Best advice to future workampers? Do the research, rent a camper and try out the lifestyle for a full season before you sell the ranch.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.

Rock Writers

If you’re thinking about writing your memoirs, reliving those boozy, drug fueled days, being on the road, crawling into bed with adoring groupies, and generally having a ball while you made a mess of your life.....get in line.

Think Keith Richards. Sammy Hagar. Steven Tyler. Patti Smith. Ozzie Osbourne. Pete Townsend. Grace Slick. Slash. Tommy Lee. Iggy Pop. Marilyn Manson. GreggAllman. Nikki Sixx. Boy George. And coming soon, Billy Idol. Think your story is any more exciting/thrilling/scary/depressing than theirs? I didn’t think so.

The glut of bios from boomer rock legends has really squeezed out any chance for amateurs like us to write our own stories. Sure, we survived the rock life style, but we were never famous to begin with, so who cares?

We have only ourselves to blame for this mess. Boomers are in a nostalgic mood, ready to slurp up all the incredible stories spouted by rock star legends who will have to be dragged off the stage (or die on it). We want to hear about Patti’s adventures with Robert Maplethorpe. Keith (or Keef as we like to call him) has some pretty spectacular stories about surviving years of touring with the Stones. Who doesn’t want to hear all about the machinations inside Bon Jovi?

There are some notable holdouts in this orgy of memoir writing. Paul McCartney, Elton John, David Bowie, and Bruce Springsteen have yet to ink memoir deals (that we know about). Either they’re waiting for the value of their potential book deal to go up or they’re resisting the siren call of multi-million dollar advances. Let’s hope it’s the latter.

But what’s an amateur memoirist to do in the meantime? Don’t hold your breath would be my first advice. Second, consider turning your tales of true life into fiction. That way you can shove in so much hyberbole that no one can challenge (“are you calling me a liar....it’s fiction, man!”). Arrested for possession of heroin in Canada, Keef? That’s nothing. You can say you were banned from Bali. Think about it. Some of these rockstar lives are so insanely over the top, the only way to top them is pure fiction.

Start typing.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.

Who You Calling Old People, Pal?

Fast Company recently wrote about AARP’s launch of a music service describing it as Pandora for old people. Well, if that isn’t the most insulting description (to boomers and Pandora), I haven’t seen one worse.

The article talks about boomers as though we have yet to discover the phonograph. Plenty of boomers are already using iPods and other mps players or getting their music from Pandora. Does the author or AARP think we will drop all our digital music sources just because they have come out with their own channel? I don’t think so.

The article descripes the AARP music service (programmed by Concord Music Group) as being designed for those entering the twilight years. Does that sound like any baby boomer you know? It has a “dead simple UI” the article notes. First of all, don’t say dead when you’re talking to us twilight year people, and secondly, you think we don’t know that UI stands for user interface? It goes on to describe the playlist as “a rotation of songs more common of sock hops than online streaming players.” Sock hops? Really? Really? The oldest of boomers have only a vague recollection of sock hops and that can be attributed to having older siblings.

AARP hopes this will help music-loving “seniors” (their word) make the transition to the digital age. Again with the belittling language. Are you telling me that the organization that should be looking out for baby boomer interests really thinks that we are so in the dark ages (with our phonographs), that we know nothing about digital music? They quote an AARP official who says that “because of changes in format and whatnot, a lot of them have gotten lost in terms of how to find their music.”

Then they trot out statistics that while “baby boomers represent the world's largest generation, they consume very little digital music compared to younger generations....those 45 and older represented barely 11% of iPod use; teens, on the other hand, represented more than 65%.”

Did it occur to anyone that maybe boomers are smart enough not to make their hearing any worse by listening to music on an iPod. Those statistics do not mean that boomers are not digital music consumers --- it just means that they don’t listen to their digital music on an iPod. A lot of boomers are listening to music on their computers at home and at work. They’re using Pandora, iTunes, and Cloud players; listening to the Tiny Desk Concerts on NPR; and learning about new artists and genres everyday. They read music reviews and then go on Amazon to sample various tracks before buying songs or an entire MP3 album.

The final insult of the article is this direct quote. “AARP has a massive reach, and a good shot at capturing the baby boomer digital music market. At least the part of the market that's willing to move on from transistor radios and 8-tracks.”

You read that right -- the author has implied that boomers still use transistor radios and play 8-track tapes. Does that make you want to grab your pitchfork and light out for the AARP offices?

While we might remember when 45s had a big hole in the middle, boomers are a lot more sophisticated about digital music than AARP thinks, and that may not bode well for their new “oldies” channel.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.