Well-off individuals and families generally place a high priority on managing and growing their wealth, but their approaches to financial decisions differ according to their age and affluence, Martini Media reported Thursday.
As a result, Martini said in a statement, financial services firms need to provide targeted guidance for achieving goals like funding lifecycle events, address concerns about trust in financial professionals and recognize that millennials will rely on different tools than their older counterparts.
The report provided details of the financial goals and online behavior of three segments of what Martini called the affluent market:
- hyper affluent, the 3% of Americans with at least $250,000 in annual household income
- mass affluent, the 25% of the population with income in the $100,000 to $249,000 range
- emerging affluent, aged 18 to 39, with $75,000 to $249,000 in income
Its findings were based on an online survey conducted by Ipsos MediaCT in January among 882 adults. The sample included 145 hyper affluents.
Survey respondents’ greatest financial concern was outliving their retirement savings. Sixty-three percent regretted they had not started saving earlier for retirement.
Moreover, 70% of affluents could not accurately estimate how much money they might need to meet future exigencies, and just 39% were confident they had saved enough money for their children’s college education.
Some key themes emerged in the report.
The survey uncovered different approaches among respondents to working with financial services firms.
Eighty percent of hyper affluents preferred to engage with firms they had previously worked with, while only 69% of their younger counterparts expressed a similar level of loyalty.
Millennials were more open to working with new firms than mass and hyper affluents.
This suggests that bigger wealth management firm are doing themselves no favor—at least in terms of attracting younger investors—by raising their minimum investment requirement for new clients.