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More Americans are considering retirement because of COVID
BLOOMBERG
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After a year of early morning Zoom calls, the specter of a deadly virus and soaring stock and real estate values, working American baby boomers who can afford it plan to get out while the getting s good.
About 2.7 million Americans age 55 or older are contemplating retirement years earlier than they d imagined because of the pandemic, government data show. They re more likely to be White, a group that typically has a larger amount of accumulated wealth, and many cite robust retirement accounts and COVID-19 fatigue for their early exit, according to interviews with wealth managers and federal surveys.
As
Bloomberg notes, those who are pondering over an early retirement consist of mostly affluent white Americans. And financial advisors told the publication that they believe that the well-off are thinking about retiring early as a result of having a life is short mentality.
The idea of going back to the office following more than a year of working from home will be a really tough pill for a lot of people to swallow, Kenneth Van Leeuwen, founder of New Jersey-based financial services firm Van Leeuwen & Co., told the publication.
In fact, a report from the Pew Research Center last year revealed an increase in the number of baby boomers who said they were retired compared to previous years (1.2 million more than the historical annual average, to be exact).
Living the ‘lifestyle practice’ dream
Why a 64-year-old RIA doesn t worry about building scale and has no plans to retire, even though he could fetch about $5 million for his firm in today’s white-hot market.
February 12, 2021 3 MINS
More than a decade of record-breaking merger and acquisition activity across the wealth management industry means nothing to Ken Van Leeuwen, because the 64-year-old owner of a $300 million advisory firm is happy right where he is.
In the parlance of industry analysts, Princeton, New Jersey-based Van Leeuwen & Co. is known as a lifestyle practice or legacy firm, meaning the owner isn’t looking for growth through acquisitions and definitely isn’t interested in selling to the highest bidder.