Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy - Softcover

Gregory Salsbury, Ph.D. is Executive Vice President of Jackson National Life Distributors LLC (JNLD) and a much sought-after industry speaker on the subjects of investor behavior, adviser best practices, and retirement.

Salsbury received a master’s degree in communications from the University of Illinois, and a second master’s degree in communication technologies from the Annenberg School of Communications. He received his doctorate in organizational communication from the University of Southern California and is published in the areas of sales, marketing, employee motivation, behavioral finance, and retirement. From his work and experience as a long-standing executive in the financial services industry, Salsbury was uniquely positioned to craft a visionary view of retirement’s future. His landmark book, But What If I Live? The American Retirement Crisis, was a wake-up call for a generation of undersaved, overspent, and unprepared Baby Boomers.

RetirementologySM: Rethinkingthe American Dream in a New Economy

Preface

I had what I thought was a great idea for a new book—a blend of two equally powerful and timely topics. The first topic deals with America’s retirement crisis and the challenge of prudent retirement planning in the midst of it. This subject provided the foundation for my first book, But What If I Live? The American Retirement Crisis. The topic remains of massive importance right now as the 77 million members of America’s most celebrated demographic group—the Baby Boomers—are commencing retirement.1 For the most part, the same behavior that created the challenges in the first place is continuing or accelerating. This painful conclusion led me to the second topic.

There is a relatively new field of work developing around psychology and finance, known alternatively as behavioral economics or behavioral finance. It focuses on how investor psychology—attitudes, biases, and emotions—impacts financial decisions and behavior. Behavioral finance researchers ask questions like: Why will people drive 45 minutes to use a $2.00 coupon? Why will people wash their own car on a Saturday morning to save 10 bucks, but would scoff at the idea of washing their neighbor’s car for $10? Why won’t people sell a poor performing stock just because they inherited it from grandma? Why do people spend differently with a credit card than they do with cash? Why do millions of people believe that they paid no income taxes because they received a refund? The painfully clear message from behavioral finance research is this: When it comes to money, people don’t always behave rationally.

I thought that the application of behavioral finance to retirement planning would be an engaging project—as much fun for me to explore as, hopefully, it would be to read. But a funny thing happened to my storyline along the way. In 2008, the market and economy crashed with a ferocity not seen in decades, and I suddenly had a third act to this play.

As the Meltdown of 2008 was unfolding, I was the keynote speaker for an industry conference in Chicago. My subject—scheduled nearly a year in advance—was “The American Retirement Crisis.” With tongue firmly implanted in cheek, I began by telling the audience that I had good news for them, and I put up my first slide, which read:

The retirement crisis is over.

I then explained that this was because—and I clicked to my second slide, which read:

Retirement is over.

It drew some nervous laughs, because people got the point: There was a retirement crisis before all financial hell broke loose, but now we have a real mess.

In fact, now we have investor psychology meeting retirement planning in the midst of a monumental financial meltdown. How has this new environment impacted some of the classic behavioral finance biases? And what should pre-retirees and retirees do about all this? These are the essential questions that Retirementology has identified. In the process, I hope to

• Identify the classic mistakes we are all making with our thinking and behavior in the key areas of earning, spending, saving, borrowing, and investing.
• Understand the scope of the financial meltdown and how it has amplified the impact of our mistakes.
• Connect those mistakes to the retirement planning process and discuss possible options to help readers aim for retirement.

Retirementology is not a typical retirement planning book, nor is it a book on psychology; it is a little bit of both. Part of what has created a retirement crisis in America is the tendency to treat retirement as a separate and static event, relegate it to a zone, or even compartmentalize it. In this regard, many seem to act as if retirement ­planning were divorced from other monetary behavior. Quite the contrary, retirement should be viewed as a process—one that begins as soon as you engage in earning, saving, spending, borrowing, or investing. Indeed, all these things are inextricably bound. For example, a pre-retirement couple may have a choice between buying a new $55,000 automobile or buying a $35,000 pre-owned automobile and putting the remaining $20,000 in a vehicle of a different sort—a retirement account. Such decisions may have a profound impact on their lifestyles in retirement. In this regard, you can’t actually build a solid approach to retirement without also tackling your approach to all the other fiscal decisions in your life. That is why behavioral finance plays such a key role in retirement planning. If we truly want to plan correctly for retirement, we need to address the mistakes we have made, and may still be making, with regard to how we think about money, how we feel about money, and how we behave with money.

In developing this book, our research team conducted nearly a dozen focus group interviews with pre-retirees and retirees, ranging in ages from 25 to 70. Our researchers posed a number of questions on topics such as the housing crisis, family issues, overspending, investor behavior, and more. Some of the responses are included in relevant chapters throughout the book and specifically identified as findings from our focus group research. In other cases, hypothetical names, people, and situations have been used to illustrate points. For example, Retirementology introduces some one-of-a-kind terms, descriptions, and scenarios, which have been created to help you better understand a number of the behaviors associated with investor psychology.

In fact, the title of our book is a one-of-a-kind term...

RETIREMENTOLOGY: ri- tahy uh r-muhnt- ol -uh-jee

A new way of thinking about retirement planning that considers both psychology and finance against a backdrop of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

After you read the book and are better informed and educated, you may be better equipped to take another important step: Partner with an adviser for professional guidance and support. But please note: The best advice on the planet is irrelevant if you procrastinate and don’t act on it.

Act 1: Turn the page.

Endnotes

1. 1 “77 Million Baby Boomers Ponder Next Career Steps,” Careers.org, October 5, 2009.

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