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November 20, 2013 at 10:02 AM
If interest rates would go back up to normal, that would help.
If public long-term care (LTC) policymakers would get over the idea that everyone involved with LTCI is a greedy moron, that would help.
If someone just conked young people on the head and got them to face the reality that they and their parents will someday be old, that would help.
But it struck me this week while I was reading an article in The New York Times about the long-term unemployed that the private LTCI community, and everyone else selling any kind of retirement planning or long-term planning investment, savings, insurance or planning tool, would benefit greatly if young consumers had some understanding of how it might be possible for them to have decent jobs when they’re in their 50s, 60s and, possibly, early 70s.
The LTCI business and other life and health businesses seem mostly to operate under the assumption that the world is the way it was 20 or 30 years ago, and that older workers tend to have great salaries, paid-off mortgages, defined benefit pension plans (or, at least, well-funded 401(k) plan accounts), helpful spouses, and kids who are out of college.
In the real world, it seems as if typical members of Generation X or Generation Y have, at best, seen a few short years of strong labor demand. Even if they now have what seems to be stable employment, they have the stable employment at a time when the Fed, Congress, and a variety of doomsayers have mostly cut off access to the kinds of generous credit cards, mortgage loans, etc. that helped members of earlier generations buy houses, cope with cash-flow glitches and possibly start small businesses.
