Are the ‘peak boomers’ financially ready to retire?

The last and largest cohort of boomers is rolling into their retirement years, but nearly two-thirds will struggle to meet their financial needs once they get there, according to new

research on the so-called peak 65 surge. Over the next several years, more Americans than ever before will reach the traditional retirement age of 65 — an estimated 4.1 million a year,

according to the Alliance for Lifetime Income (ALI). ARE YOU SAVING ENOUGH? Use AARP's Retirement Calculator to find out when — and how — to retire the way you want. More than half —

52.5 percent — have less than $250,000 in retirement assets and will have to “rely primarily on Social Security as a source of income,” according to “The Peak Boomer Impact Study,”

commissioned by ALI’s Retirement Income Institute and released April 18. Another 14.6 percent of this group, with assets between $250,000 and $500,000, “will strain to meet their financial

needs” over the course of retirement, the report says. The average expected Social Security benefit for these “peak boomers” is about $22,000 a year, the study says. “America has never seen

so many people reaching retirement age over a short period, and well over half of them will find it challenging to meet their needs through their retirements, let alone maintain their

current standard of living,” Robert Shapiro, a former U.S. undersecretary of commerce and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “They lack the protected income that many older

boomers have from solid pensions or higher savings.” Women, Black and Hispanic retirees in this group face the most acute shortage, Shapiro and coauthor Luke Stuttgen write in the report.

Shapiro is the chairman and Stuttgen a senior analyst at Sonecon, a Washington, D.C.-based economic advisory firm. THE BOOM’S LAST WAVE ALI, a financial-industry education organization that

promotes annuities as a source of regular income for retirees, coined the term “peak 65” to represent this last wave of boomers, born from 1959 to 1964. The oldest boomers were born in 1946.

According to the study, this group, which has also been dubbed the “silver tsunami,” had median retirement assets of just under $225,000 as of 2022. Those assets primarily come from

workplace retirement plans and individual retirement accounts (IRAs) but can also include bank accounts, pensions, annuities and nonretirement account investments in stocks, bonds and other

vehicles.