Wealthy millennials want automated retirement

When it comes to the personal touch in retirement planning, many rich millennials say fuggeddaboudit — they’d rather go robo.

That’s the word from Global Wealth Monitor, a study of high-net-worth millennials from Phoenix Marketing International, which also found the same isn’t true of baby boomers.

While a third of wealthy millennials — those with at least $100,000 in investable assets — take to online planning for retirement, only a fifth of boomers do.

Interestingly, while 31 percent of HNWIs between the ages of 45–54 use online financial advice tools, only 23 percent of those between the ages of 35–44 do. 

Although a good number of HNW millennials use robo tools for retirement planning, they don’t for other financial services, where they’re much more likely to look for advice somewhere other than online.

Although they’re happy enough to go online to manage their retirement portfolios, the same definitely doesn’t hold true for portfolio management in general; just 17 percent said they relied on auto advice for that.

Online financial tools also have a long way to go among HNWIs automating their quest for other financial services, such as buying life insurance (only 11 percent use online tools), managing debt (9 percent) or taxes (10 percent) or planning a major purchase (7 percent) — although other studies have shown that they certainly use online research tools to figure out just what they’ll purchase.