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July 22, 2007 at 04:00 PM
Approximately 76 million baby boomers are going through the retirement ringer, as we speak. The first baby boomer retired January 1st of 2006, and it’s said that there are some 8,000 people each day who will turn 60 years of age for the next 20 years. The marketplace for marketing annuities to this group is enormous.
Most of the boomers will be ready to retire within the next 10 to 20 years. The most critical years, according to Moshe A. Milevsky, a professor and president of QWeMA Group who has completed extensive research of the baby boomers, are the four years preceding retirement and the four years after retirement. These years are most crucial because, if you retire in a down market (and you won’t know you’re in a down market until after you have been in the market for a period of time), you could be doing the reverse of dollar cost averaging.
In other words, taking money to live on from mutual funds, etc., and selling shares that you unfortunately can’t afford to sell in a down market, is a cause for great concern. The reason for this is because a 50% loss must be followed by a 100% gain, just to get back to break even.
One of the best ways to market annuities to this marketplace is through the use of seminars. Look at your existing database and focus on people over age 50 and under the age of 75. It is advisable to offer a free consultation to the people who attend the seminar. If you get 35 to attend, 15 should be existing clients, and the rest should be friends of those clients. So, the seminar might be coined “friends helping friends.” You might want to consider sending a very nice quality invitation, wedding style.
Hold a seminar on either a Tuesday or a Thursday evening and have no more than 35 people in attendance. Create the seminar on your own, rather than using a “canned” seminar. If you build the seminar on your own, you have a better chance of buying in to what you are doing. Make sure that you get your material approved by your compliance department.
The seminar should be no more than an hour in length. You should serve dinner with no alcoholic beverages, and you should build the seminar based on the retirement dilemma of potentially “running out of money.” The fear for most seniors is outliving their income.
