Financial planners will find it heartening to know that now more than ever before, there exists vast opportunities to market their “planning wares” before the boomer demographic. Why? A recent survey by Nationwide Financial reveals some answers.

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Did you happen to catch the full-page Smith Barney ad that ran in the Wall Street Journal on March 27? (And one assumes elsewhere, as well.) This is an ad that really gets it right.

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Last fall, the AARP-fueled Focalyst study of 42,000 boomers showed that virtually every boomer—regardless of their income bracket—felt ill-prepared to maintain their current level of lifestyle into the retirement years. This isn’t just an issue of the lower and middle class.

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What comes to mind when you think of boomers being in denial about health and retirement issues? And more importantly, as a marketer, would it be interesting for you to know that somebody—in fact an entire industry—is making millions of dollars off this generational foot dragging?

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Many of us believe the late years of retirement will be more like "rewirement," a freshening up, a good powdering of our noses, some sacred space in which to finally contemplate our life's journey. We won't be like the Others, in a vapid nursing home chomping through rubbery chicken on someone's militant schedule. No sir, you won't catch us engaging in less than scintillating conversation over bingo.

After all, we may be bungee jumping. We may be hunting. We'll be anything but dying.

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En route via seaplane from St. Croix to St. Thomas recently, (how’s that for “place-dropping”) I happened to be seated next to an economist for the islands. Boomers both, our conversation quickly turned to retirement fantasies.

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In my last blog, I provided the thesis from an upbeat book about the future of boomers in the workplace from Harvard Business Press titled “Retire Retirement.” Our whitepaper “Boomer Wanted: The Next Great Workplace Revolution” echoes Tamara Erickson’s optimistic assessment of boomer prospects.

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While in this deer-in-a-headlight housing market, boomers can only dream about downsizing to their next house in the perfect location, Barbara Corcoran’s book “Nextville” makes for inspiring armchair reading. For starters, I like a book that projects forward ten, twenty years for boomers and doesn’t even mention the word “retirement” anywhere on the front cover. It’s a gutsy move, but a smart one.

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After turning 60, I decided to start spending my retirement by working toward a master’s degree at a first-rank university. It wasn’t long before I had two epiphanies:

One – It’s the most legal fun I’ve had in 40 years.

Two – I have to sit in front so I can hear everything and see what's on the blackboard or the fine print on the slides, and I need a left-handed desk in order to avoid cramps in my note-taking hand.

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By Guest Blogger Humphrey Taylor, Harris Interactive

In the 20 countries included in a Harris Interactive survey conducted for Charles Schwab and AgeWave, we found that North Americans were the least likely and Asians the most likely to see older people as a burden, who get too much for free, have little purpose in life, spend too much time living in the past and have too much time on their hands.

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In our exploration of the intersection between meaning and marketing in relation to the boomer generation, it is important to understand that spirituality and religion come in various stripes and colors. In my next blog, I’ll discuss the distinct religio-spiritual archetypes and how they relate to the stages of adult development. Marketers should pay heed lest they get on the divine express only to discover that a transcendently-grounded message perfect for one spiritual type ineffectively or even disastrously lands on the door stoop of another.

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These gleanings from a single day of online news dispatches should be enough to deflate even the proudest member of the boomer clan. File these under the heading of “believe it or not,” or perhaps “would you believe??”

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By guest blogger Brian Kurth, author of Test-Drive Your Dream Job – A Step-By-Step Guide to Finding and Creating the Work You Love (Hachette, 2008).

Retirement used to be a universally celebrated life transition. Workers who had often worked in the same profession or even the same job for decades were freed from the daily grind and released to a life of leisure.

A recent US News & World Report Money article quoting Ken Dychtwald stirred up the readers. Dychtwald, author of 16 books on aging, said that though times look bleak for boomers, he predicts a high quality of life. He paints a rosy picture of semi retirement, flourishing new businesses and twenty bonus years to enjoy it all.

You have to respect Mr. Dychtwald as he’s one of the major league boomer marketing consultants in the country. But in their posted blog responses, Paul, Bruce and Chris gave that point of view the heave-ho. One blamed financial insecurity, another loss of America’s manufacturing equity and finally acquisition mania as sad mileposts in the boomer’s coming of age.

My point is that there’re two sides to this story. For sure, marketers will look at these big, bigger, biggest population numbers marching into golden years and play to their new appetites. Question is, will those in the demographic swell have the funds to buy into it all?

-Eileen Marcus