Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• [01:58] Dr. John Migliaccio breaks down the concept of financial gerontology and its industry origins
• [06:38] The division of baby boomers into early, middle, and late groups to better understand generational financial needs
• [09:00] The growing importance of understanding intergenerational wealth transfer
• [14:23] How intergenerational wealth transfer is affected by long-term care costs and economic shifts
• [22:02] Dr. Migliaccio shares practical advice for financial planners on adopting a holistic and multi-generational approach
• [25:09] The need for financial advisors to build teams inclusive of different age ranges to address generational differences in finances
• [33:32] The rise of health-span considerations within financial planning, beyond the traditional focus on lifespan and wealth-span
• [36:41] The challenge of the emerging caregiving economy and its impact on the financial services sector
• [43:48] The implications of financial decisions as family decisions and the effectiveness of word-of-mouth referrals
• [50:56] The importance of being aware and proactive against financial exploitation, especially among seniors

In this episode…

Can demographic shifts and intergenerational wealth transfers reshape the landscape of financial services? The interplay between aging populations and wealth distribution raises questions about economic preparedness and adaptability. As baby boomers retire, the financial services industry faces unprecedented challenges and opportunities. How are professionals adapting to these demographic changes, and what strategies are emerging to tackle the complexities of intergenerational wealth management?

Dr. John Migliaccio, a financial services professional, offers insightful perspectives on the evolving field of financial gerontology, a discipline that merges financial planning with the study of aging. He discusses how the concept emerged in the 1980s to address changing demographics and the financial needs of aging populations. Dr. Migliaccio emphasizes the importance of understanding the nuances within generational cohorts, such as the diverse range of experiences of early, middle, and late baby boomers. The conversation extends to the longevity economy, highlighting the need for financial advisors to adapt their strategies to cater to clients' evolving needs, including long-term care, health expenses, and wealth transfer complexities.

In this episode of Advisor Today, Suzanne Carawan sits down with Dr. John Migliaccio, an expert in financial gerontology, about the convergence of financial services and demographic trends. Dr. Migliaccio discusses the financial gerontology concept and its industry origins, the growing importance of understanding intergenerational wealth transfer, advice for financial planners on adopting a holistic and multi-generational approach, and the implications of financial decisions as family decisions.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Chris Gandy on LinkedIn
• Suzanne Carawan on LinkedIn 
• NAIFA
• Dr. John Migliaccio on LinkedIn

Quotable Moments:

• "Financial gerontology connects money, finances, and aging — it's not about old people, but the context of generations we're all part of."
• "We're all aging, nobody can get away with that, but the context of aging makes a big difference in terms of product, services, demands, marketplaces."
• "Financial decisions are family decisions, and a lot of families are reluctant to discuss those with each other."
• "The financial advisement field is like brain surgery — it's not a do-it-yourself operation."
• "If you do well by an older adult in whatever service, they'll recommend you to three of their friends. If you don't, they'll tell ten of their friends."

Action Steps:

1. Embrace holistic planning: Address a broader range of client needs, including health and caregiving concerns. 
2. Understand generational nuances: Advisors can better tailor their services and products to meet the unique needs of each generational cohort, enhancing client satisfaction and retention.
3. Facilitate family financial conversations: Encouraging clients to engage in family financial discussions can be pivotal in ensuring smooth intergenerational wealth transfers. 
4. Build a multigenerational team: Consider building a diverse team that includes professionals from different generations to help in connecting with a wider client base.
5. Stay informed on financial exploitation: By being vigilant and proactive, advisors can help protect their clients’ assets, fostering trust and demonstrating their commitment to client safety and security.

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, or NAIFA, the #1 association for producers in financial services. 

At NAIFA, we enhance professional skills, promote ethical conduct, and advocate for legislative and regulatory environments.

By joining NAIFA, you gain access to a partnership that elevates your performance while providing greater purpose to your professional work. NAIFA members are happier, make more money, and stay in the business longer.

Get in touch with NAIFA and learn more about how to join NAIFA by visiting NAIFA.org.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:00 

Welcome to NAIFA's Advisor Today, a podcast series where we focus on how financial advisors work, live, and give to their local communities and our greater financial services industry. Now let's get started with the show.

Suzanne Carawan 0:20 

Hello. Welcome to Advisor Today. I'm your host, Suzanne Carawan, and I'm here today with John Migliaccio, who's going to be our guest. We're delighted to talk to John because it still is in November, it's Long-Term Care Awareness Month, and we want to talk about some of the work that John does tangentially related to that month, as well as talk about John and coming from the FSP side of membership. So today's episode is sponsored by the Lifetime Health Care Center. And if you missed it last week, we just did our peak 65 series impact day. All of that is available on demand. And John is going to be one of the contributing officers to that center as well, as well as he's a contributing author to The Society of Financial Service Professionals journal, and we're going to learn about him and all the good work that he's doing as we go forward today. So John, welcome to the program.

Dr. John Migliaccio 1:12 

Thank you very much, Suzanne, great to be here with you.

Suzanne Carawan 1:17 

Yeah, we got chatting, John and I got the opportunity to kind of connect, because he was doing an inaugural session, which we're going to hear about in a couple of minutes. But before we get into that, John, for all the viewers out there and listeners as well, let's just start with the basics of what is financial gerontology, because we're excited to explore that topic. We know a lot of people maybe never have heard that topic. Now, if you're in the long-term care space, you trip over gerontologists all the time, but if you're a regular, maybe Main Street insurance or financial advisor, maybe you're not so familiar with what this kind of academic pursuit is. So how about we start with that?

Dr. John Migliaccio 1:58 

Well, financial Gerontology is really a creature of the insurance industry. It was created back in the mid-1980s it was kind of introduced around 1986 by Joseph Bettner, who was the president of the Philadelphia insurance company. It's been his entire career in the insurance industry. And Davis Greg, who was the president of the American Institute of financial gerontology, of finance, and Wider University and University of Pennsylvania, the Wharton School, were all places where financial Gerontology was placed by them, essentially. But they sometime in the mid-1980s they realized, the light bulb went off just about the demographics of the United States, the baby boom, quote, unquote, and what impact that was going to have going forward on the financial services industry and related industries, and to increase the awareness and research and information about that phenomena, that demographic phenomena that was occurring.

So they spent a few years kind of gathering and organizing what financial Gerontology was about. And they introduced it formally into financial services, you know, through the journal, at that time, the Journal of CLU and CHF, see said, here's financial gerontology. And what it basically is, is the connection between money, finances and aging. It's not about old people, it's about the context of generations. And we're all aging. Nobody can get away with that. But the context of aging makes a big difference in terms of product, services, demands, marketplaces, etc, and so they, they kind of foresaw almost 40 years ago, what was going to be happening today. And we're certainly seeing that transition. We're in the middle of it right now with what's called the longevity economy. And so this is now this transition between the older portions of the population, and the younger portions of the population. And that includes money, intergenerational wealth transfer. It includes long-term care issues. It includes how the different generations view money and the economic conditions in which they came up, and what differences, you know, those they make, and particularly, understanding the nuances like you know people talk about, well, there's the baby boom.

Well, that's an 18 year measure of population. And it was defined by the Census Bureau, in one year, you suddenly had, you know, over 3 million live births. And that continued, and got up to four point something million live births over the period of time. And then when it got down to around 3 million births, again, it's okay, it's over. Okay. So that's an 18-year time frame. And so you can't equate somebody born on January 1, 1946 with somebody born December 31 1964, they're the same generational context. But certainly you can't, we second amount into three, six-year groups. When I was working with MetLife, we said, that's impossible. You can't do that. You can't do that in financial services, because these folks are essentially different iterations of the same generation.

So the framework of this is, how do you help financial service professionals in the financial services industry understand better what the context of the money and the aging that's coming across the screen, if you will. And it was very prescient. I think of Joe Bettner and Greg to be in the mid-1980s saying, we need to do something. And they were in the perfect position because of the American college position as a certification granting institution.

Suzanne Carawan 6:34 

So, so tell me that again. So you, you're talking about six year increments.

Dr. John Migliaccio 6:38 

Well, for the baby boomers, yeah, baby boomers, it's different.

Suzanne Carawan 6:45 

How do they come up with six years?

Dr. John Migliaccio 6:49 

I do a lot of training out in the field. And I was, where were you the day Kennedy was assassinated. John Kennedy was assassinated, and half the people can remember where it was. Half the people weren't even born yet. And so you can't put this context of this 18 years into one big lump, right? So the reason we do early boomers, middle boomers and late boomers, at least that's the way we divvied it up when we did. Actually we did numerous major studies on Baby Boomers when I was at the MetLife Mature Market Institute to help the field understand how different those groups were. So and it was important financially, because there were inheritances, intergenerational inheritances that were going through that would affect different components of that, even that one generation very differently then you had, Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, millennials, you've got every kind of mix now, and each of them look differently at money and the kind of the even the technology that's available to them, for looking at their finances.

So the context of financial gerontology is we take a very, very broad look at what financial professionals need in order to understand the markets better, to respond to market opportunities better, to understand what products and services may be reducing in demand and increasing in demand, and to give them a framework for making better decisions and establishing better relationships with their clients across generations.

Suzanne Carawan 8:42 

So now, do you see that if there were six year increments prior with the early, middle, late boomers, is that actually speeding up with technology and people are actually changing at a more rapid rate within the generation because of the context in which they're growing up.

Dr. John Migliaccio 9:00 

I mean, it certainly could be that it's, I mean, it's certainly happening and so, if you look at the oldest boomers than the youngest boomers, that's an 18 year difference. 4764 and then there are other components of that. So, we talk about this generation, that generation? Well, the millennials, for the most part, are the children of the baby boomers at various levels, okay, and then there's birth, highs and lows over the course of that time as well. So and the economics, that just, you know, kind of the National Economic scene changes within those. Okay, so if you look at late boomers, they did not have the same kind of advantages financially as the younger boomers, because the younger boomers and middle boomers were inheriting money from their parents, who were there after the post-World War Two. It was a post-world war two baby boom, but it was also a post-World War Two economic boom as well.

So the further you get away from that, the you know, the less impact that can have in terms of future generations. So, now you're looking at this big flow of money in there was a, I recommend people take a look at an article that came in the New York Times about six or eight months ago on this intergenerational wealth transfer. Because when we did one of the first studies we did when I got into the MetLife Mature Market Institute, was inter-generation, I said, we need the number, what? How much? Tell me how much. And this is just now, between baby boomers and their kids. And at the time, it was about, and I made it was a long time ago. Some the numbers may be a little off. It's about $18 trillion okay, which at the time was about the third or fourth-largest gross domestic product in the world, right? Okay, right.

Now, the most recent ones, because of the way the economy is run, particularly with the stock market, etc, etc, it's now out to about $158 trillion. So, yeah, like, you know, a trillion here, a trillion there. Pretty soon you're talking about real money. So it's really important for financial professionals and others, you know, related kinds of organizations, particularly in health areas, because of the way longevity is changing and the way medicine is changing, introducing that, the fact that there are, you talked about the sandwich generation, but actually my colleagues, Neil Cutler and Janice Wassel, who were columnist and actually Neil was the Head of Financial Gerontology at Widener and These other organizations, worked directly with Joe Bettner and Davis Greg came up with the senior sandwich generation.

And I'm a perfect example of that. My father lived into his mid-90s. My mother was 100.3 years old when she passed away last year. I'm in my mid-70s. So here I am. I'm an only young buck. Yeah, right. Some people in my family say, Oh, my God, please don't let them, you know, last that long. We can't take it away. He is now. But the change was that I had between my grandparents and my parents, I had almost 40 years of caregiving. Just me, right, yeah, right, just you and so, my parents were in assisted living, and then my father had had some dementia issues, so we used a memory care unit. My mother was still as we like to describe her as feisty, for her entire life, until the day she passed away. And so, you have these kinds of issues where their parents passed away in their 70s. My mother's parents were also long-lived in as well. So that's probably where that death was coming from. But my father's family, he lived into his mid-90s, right? And his parents had died in their 70s, right?

So you've got this whole dynamic going on in which it's important to understand all the various nuances in there in order to really run a successful business, to run a profitable business, and to do well by your clients when it comes to financial services, because now you've got, birth rates are changing. You know, millennials are having children later and fewer. They're having fewer children than prior. So this whole dynamic of just that flow of that inter generate, let's not even talk about the other stuff, just that intergenerational wealth transfer becomes this, what I call spaghetti demographics, right? You never know where you're going to come out at the other end, if you start over here, because it depends on what strand you're looking at within that framework.

Suzanne Carawan 14:23 

Okay, I see what you're saying, but having said that, I mean, so you're saying that the intergenerational wealth transfer bucket of money has really exponentially grown, but knowing that people have longevity now for a much longer time frame, with long term care, and the amount that it costs on all those things, is that not going to completely, almost take away that bucket of money, and we're not going to see that trickledown effect?

Dr. John Migliaccio 14:52 

Well, that's the importance of the financial services professionals are, right? Yeah. I mean, their expertise is what will allow that to happen so that you can take advantage of, I know we're talking about Long Term Care Month. And obviously, while I was at Met Life, at the Mature Market Institute, they were, they were the long-term care insurance carrier for AARP. And so you need to look at those kinds of things and have some determination about what will work for your clients in terms of that. So long-term care, I mean, long-term care insurance, everybody was on board. This is the early 2000s, essentially the first decade or so of the 2000s and a little bit longer. And long-term care insurance was going through the roof. MetLife withdrew from the long-term care insurance marketplace, as did others, major companies around that time, and so, we're sitting there going, what's that about?

I mean, those are obviously corporate financial decisions to do that, but it has an impact out in the out in the population. You don't have as much product available. The Product costs may be very different, etc, etc. It may not. You have to make a determination whether it makes sense to have long-term care insurance health care across the United States are astronomical in comparison a lot of other places, sure, yeah. And so that becomes a real issue. That's when you look at the pieces of personal wealth through these generations, you see that, as people age, they're not spending so much money on this side of the marketplace, but they're spending a lot more on the other end of the marketplace, and a lot of that is health care related.

Suzanne Carawan 16:59 

Absolutely, yes, so and you're certainly, you're seeing an explosion of options and funding options and products and everything's trying, finally, kind of starting to catch up with this demographic. Yeah. Hey, the good thing about the baby boomers is they create so much innovation in the market about everything to do with all of it, right? So all the different ways to age now and longevity and vitality. And so, yeah, subsequent generations will be better off, having said that, though, would you not say we're in crisis, like we're in crisis? I don't know that everybody's prepared for this.

Dr. John Migliaccio 17:32 

Yeah, it's funny. But I've been at this, I've been in this game a long, long time and so for decades now, I have seen issues that people don't save enough, anybody, right? Baby Boomers, they don't save enough, etc, etc. They're not going to have enough money. But what I don't see over all these years is them complaining about that and because this is now part of where you need to combine the financial side with the aging process side. Okay, because older adults, as they get older, are very resilient and again, I started my career. I worked for a division of very small, the smallest division of the Hearst Corporation for a company called Retirement Advisors, Incorporated, which had been a basically a HR establishment for unions, corporations, multi-employer pension plans, etc, etc, providing retiree information, newsletters and pre-retiree information and booklets and training and seminars and all that kind of stuff. And the one thing that always struck us, we would do our own internal surveys.

I mean, we had almost half a million subscribers, if you will, through their corporations, etc, a month. So, our newsletters, we would say, you know, come in, right, tell us about whatever and when we would talk about them feeling like their own funding was inadequate. Now, obviously, these are folks with a pension, with a three-legged stool at least. And later on in, a four-legged stool with the 401 Ks, etc, etc. So they were, you're working, you know, we had all these trade unions, etc, etc, the teamsters all over the country, etc. So these were middle-class, working folks. And the one thing that we would do when we would do those surveys, we would get 1000 responses from that, because, right, we might find 2% 3% of them said, I'm really in financial strength, okay? And part of that is the fact that, if you only have this amount of money, you adapt to how.

Having that money and living so true, like, you're not like, aspirational, oh, you know, I have to buy a new Cadillac every year, right? Okay, so I'll keep my Chevy for a couple of more years. It's no big deal. What they were concerned about was supporting their families, their kids and their grandkids. And that's really the issue for them, and it has financial impact for them. Right now, we're looking at older adults and their commitment to educational expenses for their children and grandchildren, and you know that that's extremely high, and they're deeply involved in supporting their kids and their grandkids in terms of educational costs, so that ends up debt in their lap. You know that they maybe not, had counted on those kinds of things, but that wasn't there when they were putting their money in Right, right, right. So you have this dynamic between the accumulation stage and the decumulation stage that occurs that's different for all these generations. Okay? And so that's why it's a very, very complex that's why I call it spaghetti demographics.

Suzanne Carawan 21:13 

Yeah, like a spaghetti demographic mix.

Dr. John Migliaccio 21:16 

So what you need to do is, you need to understand this, where does this strand go, and where does it come out on the end? And what's going on in the middle with because it's not just them, it's them, it's their spouses, right? This has a heavy impact on women and financial security. It has to do with generations from generation to generation, and what happens beyond that, and then you've got the just the general framework of what's going on in the economy, one way or the other, on top of it.

Suzanne Carawan 21:48 

So what kind of advice are you giving to retired people that are holistic planners now that are doing these things? How are you getting them up to speed on all of these kind of nuances and what they should really focus in on.

Dr. John Migliaccio 22:02 

Well, I think you, I mean, you really hit it on the head. Thank you. I mean, I think that the trend that we seeing was, we were talking 30 years ago to financial planners about the fact you can't, I mean, it's great that you're a financial planner. It's great you're an expert in your area. But with the need of a client is, they're going to come to you with questions like, like, Mom's getting ill, and I have to put her in a place, like, what do we do? Okay, right? Yeah, oh, I don't know. Okay. So as long as 30 years ago, we were recommending that you get a team together within your practice, of people that you can go to, and I see more of that, and they're talking about this whole list, they're getting name holistic, you know, this holistic planning framework, which I think is really, really important, because you can't be, I mean, it's like, as far as I'm concerned, financial planning is like brain surgery. It's not a do-it-yourself operation. You know you want to have, you need to have the right people in the room who will make sure that you come out whole in the end. And that applies to the financial services side as well. So you certainly want to have your own expertise. You want to have multi generations within your practice. Average age of financial planners themselves is now going up,

Suzanne Carawan 22:11 

Oh, yeah.

Dr. John Migliaccio 23:02 

Even within NAIFA, with the FSP, context was as somewhat older group of professionals now merged into NAIFA,, so the average age of NAIFA, members now has gone up, some research that I've seen this is for the general financial services professional populations, that is in the 60s.

Suzanne Carawan 23:50 

Somewhere between that 57 to 62 right?

Dr. John Migliaccio 23:53 

Yeah. So probably on average in there. And I did, I did a column looking at ageism as one kind. So that's one of the other things, topic area within the financial Gerontology arena, that most financial service professionals don't get. I mean, they experience it maybe one way or the other. But what I found in gathering information for the column was younger financial professionals don't want to work with older clients, and older clients don't want to work with younger financial professionals. They don't have enough experience, or they've got whatever. So you need to have this mix now in your practice in order to respond one way or the other to whatever's flowing in there.

Suzanne Carawan 24:40 

Right? So not just practice areas, but to actually have the mix be thoughtful and intentional about having a mix of the ages in there, which is kind of funny, because, if you get to health care, usually you want the young doctor, right, not the older doctor, because, the young doctor is still staying up on the research and the methods and everything else. So it's a little bit, uh. Reverse there, I think, in financial services, but yeah. And maybe we should look at that and say, can we change that narrative? But I'm with you. You need the blend, yeah, which makes sense? Any good practice.

Dr. John Migliaccio 25:09 

Yeah. The funny thing was, is the ages, and we look at ageism as young versus old, and what I found was that it's old versus young as well. The age, it goes in both directions, and so you need to be prepared for having the kind of services and the kind of personnel that will be able to respond to that one way or the other. You also need to have external experts, right? You need to have estate planning folks that you can rely on and refer to. You need to have healthcare cost experts that are part of your team so that you can address those issues when they come up. And I don't know if any of any you know folks out there, and probably some have tried to deal with the Medicare system. I mean, I know one person the entire United States who can sit down and they can make sense out of it. And she's in Chicago, and I won't give you her name, because I don't want her to be overwhelmed with people saying, well, she knows what's going on.

Suzanne Carawan 26:16 

We've got, well, luckily, what one association, John, can you find all these people in right? There's one that I can think of. Can you think of what association that is?

Dr. John Migliaccio 26:25 

Let me see I think it's coming. It's getting clearer. Yeah, I mean, and that's exactly, I mean, that's exactly the power of NAIFA and the power of FSP now, you know, being part of it, so you really have a lot you can draw from finding that kind of expertise.

Suzanne Carawan 26:55 

And we have to, right, because it's like, I think you can think of it as so I come out of a somewhat of a health care background, so that, that idea of having the health care team. So let's take cancer right? If you're a cancer patient, you've got your oncologist, your surgeon, right? You've got your radiologist, you've got your nutritionist all the way through. So you've got a whole team of people that are experts to take care of you. Or you can take a more positive approach and say, okay, each one of your clients is an athlete. If I'm going to train an athlete, I just don't have one coach. I have multiple coaches, right? And you need to have the performance mindset again, the nutritionist, my conditioning coach, etc. We need to think about our clients, is what NAIFA saying from this perspective, right?

And there's this intersection that's coming about health and wealth, right? And these pieces, and how are we going to do that? So let's talk about that. What about the health? What about the housing part of it? Right? Because what about the housing part and how much things have changed with COVID and the generations and all that? What are you seeing now in the world of financial gerontology and the academics and what's what people are projecting.

Dr. John Migliaccio 28:05 

Yeah, one of the best things you can do for your clients is find somebody to help them get all the stuff out of their house.

Suzanne Carawan 28:13 

What do you mean like that? Like meaning like stopping a pack rat?

Dr. John Migliaccio 28:17 

I mean, it took me almost two years to empty my parents’ house, home, when my father got sick, and we had to find someplace else for them to be. My kids are petrified of what's going to happen. God forbid that I should heal over tomorrow. All right. And there are experts. There are people out there that have their own business doing that kind of thing you need to...

Suzanne Carawan 28:44 

Really, like elder liquidation, if you will.

Dr. John Migliaccio 28:48 

Well, yeah, and, or how to downsize. Yeah, so and part of the reason for that was that that was all created as an issue for me, the caregiver by an illness on the part of my parents, essentially my father, right? Okay, and I've been in gerontology for 30 years. I still was absolutely no idea where to go and what to do. Okay, and so and so, I finally was able, through you know, networking, to find some folks who could help me out with that. My mother, God bless her, had upheld from every extinct memo in the northern hemisphere, you know, yeah. So, you know, what? What do you do with that stuff? I had a closet full of that stuff.

Suzanne Carawan 28:48 

No, it's a really good point. I mean, having that conversation, knowing, I know.

Dr. John Migliaccio 29:03 

It's a good thing the PETA folks hadn't heard about it, or they would have been, they would have had a demonstration in front of their house. So, it's these kinds of things. And the reason I'm bringing it up is because, not because, oh, they're old or whatever it was a health bank, right? Anticipated health bag that nobody anticipated and you're unprepared for.

Suzanne Carawan 30:21 

And having that conversation, I think we as Americans, again, we're a culture that is so focused on youth and all of that, and has been for so long. But we need to get with the bounty of our boomers. We need to get good at having conversations about really, Legacy maybe, and putting in that positive spin and talking about it, because I think you're right, until something happens. Because I think before we got on and we were talking about my own story, and so I became a caregiver of my mother when I was 19, I had to drop out of school. I had to take care of her until she died, and then transfer universities, and it was just something that you don't realize at 19, that's kind of an anomaly. But later on, I had my own health care of my own, and I came home and I was in a big house, and I had my husband and two young sons, and I'm looking around, and to your point, I'm looking at this house, and we've got, multiple rooms with TVs, multiple couches, you start thinking like I had four sets of China.

I had a teapot collection because it had all been inherited down from right one day, all of my mother stuff showed up at my door, and so I had books and books and books and my father had to empty out the house. At some point after she died, my mom was an artist, and all of her artwork and all of her sculptures and all of her paintings, and he was overwhelmed. So guess what he did? He threw them all out. And so to this day, my sister and I have one painting each, and that's it, right? And we're devastated by this fact, but I look at it now and I realize, I see where he was. He needed to get out. And he's like, what do you do with this? Because you can't take it with you. So having that conversation and a plan, probably inter-generationally, about what's actually important is. But back to me, so that day, I decided I'm downsizing, and that's it liquidated.

Dr. John Migliaccio 32:12 

And that's a role for the advisor. I mean, I think, I think for advisors to reach out and talk to their clients, and it doesn't have to be, like a whole big, dramatic thing, have a seminar, have something with an expert in that area come in and talk about and understanding the difficulties of doing that. Yeah. I mean, it was necessary, but difficult and so you need this help.

Suzanne Carawan 32:39 

It is, but she could put a positive thing on. I mean, make it into, like, a legacy brand, like, if you want to take social media into it now, it's about preservation, right? It's about legacy brand. And it's not stockpiling stuff anymore. It's taking the minimalist view.

Dr. John Migliaccio 32:53 

Yeah. And I think, I think that you know, the way you're describing is exactly the way you want to, you want to frame it within it. So we're not talking about, oh, you got to get rid of all your stuff. You got to do this. This is about your legacy. What do you want your legacy to be? You want your legacy to be your kids complaining about the fact that, what am I going to do this? I don't want your head. They don't want your house. They don't want your house. Hear that all the time. Yeah, it's like, give it here. Give me a, you know, 1,500 square foot anchor and throw it around my head and let me have to deal with it. Okay?

Suzanne Carawan 33:26 

Now, if you got a condo like rent-controlled Manhattan, maybe a different story.

Dr. John Migliaccio 33:32 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, definitely nuances there geographic issue. But anyway, but yeah, and that's part of the way that advisors need to look at this. But we know when one of the things that happened in the framework of financial Gerontology was there was a progression from just the lifespan right to the wealth span. Was the next kind of up, and now they're talking about the health span as well. Okay, so there's those three spans, all of which are related, that people are now recognizing, that I see happening, so they're starting to talk about the health span now, which is another component of it.

Suzanne Carawan 34:17 

Which really should dominate everything? How did that not come first?

Dr. John Migliaccio 34:23 

Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit different now because of the longevity. And you have to be careful when you're looking at the whole, lifespan kind of issue, because it's affected by, in general, by gross global things like COVID, life expectancy actually got reduced as a result of COVID went down. Yeah, right, but that was only because of who it impacted more than other, and just in terms of generations, it was people a little over 65 right? They had young, basically, young folks and old folks who were most impacted by the COVID stuff, and it had an impact on that. And so you need to take a look at that. The other thing that's around, just from the healthcare side, is the dearth of healthcare workers now is starting to become an issue. I just came back from a very large national conference a week or so ago, and there were dramatically more attention to health care, the healthcare workforce, than there has been in the past. And so that's becoming an issue now, just where is the workforce going to come from.

Suzanne Carawan 35:40 

Right? Who's going to take care of everybody?

Dr. John Migliaccio 35:41 

Right, because you now have the oldest baby boomers now, you know, getting into their 70s and 80s and that's prime time for those kinds of services to be needed. And the people talk about the baby boom and the baby, we're just at the forward edge of the baby. I don't even call it, people have called it the age wave. I don't call it the age wave. I call it the age wavelets, because every year you have this dynamic, people who are popping out because they pass away, and people who are coming in. So this is like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, 18 years.

Suzanne Carawan 35:43 

This is a tsunami, right? Yes.

Dr. John Migliaccio 36:19 

And so you need to be aware of how that's going to happen. And we're still at the front end. We're not even the, I mean, the back end of the boomer generation was really 1958 to 1964 that's when it really hit the high. We're at the front end.

Suzanne Carawan 36:34 

Yeah, we're at the very front end, right? So caregiving, this caregiving economy, right? Are we going to solve this?

Dr. John Migliaccio 36:41 

Right? Exactly, and that's what's going to happen. And most of the boomers had fewer children than their parents did, and even than they did. And you're seeing less child, less childbirth, birth rates going after that. So who's going to need care in 20 years, who's going to be the workforce in 20 years? What does that demographic look like today? Because if it's smaller, you're not going to have the same number of people that you're going to need, right? So that's why I'm saying, all these dynamics interact in different ways, depending on where you are in the demographics, and each one of things makes a difference in terms of financial services and professionals.

Suzanne Carawan 37:28 

So, we know we have a financial services crisis on the magnitude of the people, meaning professionals, on the magnitude of the doctor nursing shortage, right and caregiver crisis. So all the millennials out there. It's like, why are they not pouring into financial services? How do we get them to come in and say, because look at, again? Or is financial services structure that you just want to be with your own peer group, you want the same age people taking care of you, right? Right? How do we break some of that? But that millennial group, they're bigger than everybody. They're the ball for the workforce, right? How do we say and we need them, right? We need them working. Yeah, we need them paying into the system and all this stuff. But what's your take there? When you address that type of that population, what words of wisdom can you provide there?

Dr. John Migliaccio 38:17 

I think one of the things to be looking at is, there's all this money, we've talked about, trillions and trillions of dollars. So it's not all going to happen over to everybody in the same way. People with a lot of money are going to leave a lot of money. People with less money are going to leave less money. People with you know, even less money are going to leave right?

Suzanne Carawan 38:33 

So it's a gap getting bigger, wealth getting bigger.

Dr. John Migliaccio 38:37 

And so what you need to do is, is why it's so important. I mean, I got my first true financial advisor, who was the person who worked with my dad, when I started working, had a job, had a house and kids and all that kind of stuff. I said, like, what do I do? You know, go talk to so and so. And I did. And the funny thing was, is my father's financial advisor passed away before he did, right? I mean, there I was now with the trusted, you know, the trusted advisor was no longer there. Where do you go? What do you do? Okay, and I was working with folks in the financial services industry, so I was lucky that I was aware of people and had connection with people. So you need to be thinking about how the millennials are going to be coming along and where, what do they have? What do they think they're going to have? This is where the advisor in having a family conversation.

So there's one premise in financial Gerontology that we emphasize over and over again, financial decisions are family decisions, but I call the financial Gerontology F words right, financial decisions are family decisions, and a lot of families are reluctant to discuss those with each other. They just, my parents presumed that, oh, boy, they had this really nice house out in Jersey. And boy am I going to want to have that when they're when they've passed away. Well, talk about nightmares, you know. So nobody had the conversation about that, yeah. And so that's one of the things that has to happen, because all this, most of this money, I mean, just in bulk, is going to be transferred from the baby boomers over time to the millennials over time, and the millennials kids over time, right? Grandkids? Okay, you want to be talking about that kind of a framework within the family.

It's multi-generational, and involves everybody. And quite frankly, the financial advisor that my kids have and some friends, is the financial advisor that we've grown to trust as well. So this is a word-of-mouth thing. So, I talk about the three best ways that older adults communicate is, telephone, telegraph and telesenior. So, because, because we actually did some research, if you do well, by an older adult in whatever service it is, they'll tell you they'll recommend you to three of their friends. If you don't, they'll tell a tale on you with 10 of their friends.

So, you want to be within the context of, of having the older adults be your benefactor in terms of services, but also your loudspeaker, yeah, because the millennials, my kids are millennials, right? And when they started getting out of college and having jobs and having careers, you know, they said, Well, where do we go? What do we do? Go talk to my guy. You don't have to step, this person has these kinds of people working, you know, within the context of that practice. And you know, if you like them, find, if you don't, we'll help you find someplace else. I know that there's been some controversy within NAIFA about some designations that are, you know, ostensibly controversial at this point, okay. And so there are those kinds of issues as well, in terms of where you go and who you see.

Suzanne Carawan 42:27 

But you know, I don't know if that's necessarily just a senior thing, because I'd say that I call it, you mentioned something, but I call it the sideline effect. And so when I was a younger mother, and in youth sports, the moms all stand on the sideline and they're waiting for their kids for practice. And we had a pediatrician in town, and so I was new to town, and I said, hey, I'm new, like, what pediatrician? And they said, oh, we have two pediatricians in town. They're so and so and so and so. And don't ever go to so and so, because they have a horrible bedside manner. Okay? So I said, Okay. So I went to the other pediatrician, right? Because that's what the mom said, because they know, and they had older kids in the whole bed. Well, when you know that the second pediatrician, he had to close up shop and leave town, because the sideline effect is so strong that you get that bad word of mouth with a bunch of moms, yeah. So I think, to your point. I love that, because, yes, I think that the tele senior, I think there's also the tele mom role in there too. That's part of your practice.

Dr. John Migliaccio 43:31 

I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't start with the senior, but at that point you want, that's what you want to take it. But on the other end, you want to tell them moms, that's exactly.

Suzanne Carawan 43:38 

Yeah, you need the telemoms. And you can plant those in your practice. I mean, you could identify those people and say, start the conversations. It's important, yeah.

Dr. John Migliaccio 43:48 

Back in the day, we would do, when I was at hears and retirement advisors, we had a cadre of trainers to go out and talk to pre-retirees about retirement. They weren't subject matter experts. They were executives or managers or whatever, from companies and from unions, because they could go out and they could talk the language of the people that they were meeting, right? And people loved them. I mean, it was just great. And then, we would, we would throw in an expert here or there, you know, on particular areas. But we were doing that all over the country. And so you want to have, again, within the context of financial professional, you want to have those assets for your own practice. And I remember, and just go back for a second on the family stuff. I was invited out to do a program for essentially the top 100 agents in this very, very large financial services company.

So I walk into this big auditorium, and there were some currently highly, well-known, recognized financial folks who were the top executives in this organization. And so I went in and I started talking to this group about this whole thing, financial issues, of family issues component. And I asked among the group, just as a general question, I said, How many of you have a really good relationship with your main major client, right? 99% of people raise their hand, right? And how many of those major major clients, your major contact is the husband or the father in that family, and 98% of them raised their hand. I said, okay, so you have a really great relationship with the dad, with the male, and it sounds like maybe a little bit, that's the major thing, I said, so let me tell you what's going to happen. Dad's going to die approximately seven years before his wife. Okay?

The wife is going to have now inherit, in the typical scenario, all of the assets that you have in your book of business with that person. Okay, that widow doesn't know you. You haven't established a relationship with her. And so what is she going to do? She's going to start talking to her friends. She's going to start talking to her cousin, she's going to start talking to maybe her kids. Okay? And what's going to happen is that probably within 10 to 12 months, that book of business is going to walk out of your practice, one person and they were all like, I thought one guy was going to faint in the front row. He went, he's like, pale. I thought we were gonna have to do, like, resuscitation, lipo, following off. Yeah, about that, and that's why it's so important that you have this connection, the family connection, in doing this, because it doesn't matter what you're talking about, health, wealth, lifespan, whatever. That's the component that has, that has the hooks into the finances, right, one way or another.

Suzanne Carawan 43:48 

That's a good point, the power dynamic, I can't emphasize enough. I mean, as the power dynamics, if you're sitting down to counsel and starting with a couple, etc, you better figure out financial advisor who has the power dynamics and make no assumptions. Yeah, because John, I can tell you the number of people I've walked away with from, in services of any kind, because if they don't understand quickly the power dynamics, right? Who does what? I have no time for that, yeah. So, yeah, that's true. And then that's, again, I think, nowadays, that there's no per se saying, who has it. You need to really figure it out and get really good at those conversations, because that's cultural, that's all sorts of stuff in there.

Dr. John Migliaccio 48:00 

Yeah. And so I think having, having a family conversation, even if those somebody in that mix is not your client, right, somebody in that family is and you can create credibility for yourself, and for your business, and for your clients who walk talk with other clients, to bring that in and to have at least a demonstration of awareness about that. That's what financial Gerontology brings. So it get you out of this narrow framework of, I'm there to take care of the money.

Suzanne Carawan 48:42 

Well, I love that, so I was going to say, because I still think that tends to be, it's still a taboo topic. So what can financial Gerontology do? Or what can advisors? Where can they look to for resources, cetera, to help to not make this combination of the finance and the aging taboo, because it's so uncomfortable for most Americans?

Dr. John Migliaccio 49:07 

Yeah. I mean, obviously you start with the client. If you have a client or if somebody's been referred to you from someone else to get them in the mix as well. I mean, it, I mean, it goes back to, I mean, this is the basics, probably from the first cave in man insurance cave person, during somebody, and that's having the relationship and having the trust. And so whatever it takes to be able to do that is an important component. And it was really interesting. But I'm on an advisory board on financial exploitation with the National Association of Protective Services, and one of the things that I heard at that, at that conference was, and there were financial professionals there talking about the fact that they are creating, either a person or some component of their business to take a look at financial exploitation.

That's really an emerging issue, and it's a big issue. I mean, the first research that we did, and this was back around 2009 2010 when I was at Met Life, we came up with what we call the headline number, how much was financial? Absolutely not. This is the tip of the iceberg, but we know that that's exactly the tip. That's exactly the number. It's exactly the number of people, because we had the top experts looking at this, and it was $3 billion a year. $3 billion, and that was in 2010.

Suzanne Carawan 50:54 

On financial exploitation, right?

Dr. John Migliaccio 50:56 

And so and so. This is the big financial services that come in starting to get serious about this. I mean, my own bank, I can't get into my own bank account unless I go through like a five things to be aware of for financial exploitation. And so that's another component of it. And I've been targeted by, you know, some of this as well. So, the artificial intelligence can be very useful throughout this new framework. I mean, obviously everybody's looking at it and involved in it, but it's a double edged sword. And so there, there needs to be some attention to that among I really appreciate my bank saying, John, we're going to let you take a look at your finances. But before you do, finances. But before you do, we want to be sure you know of ways in which you could lose that money.

And that's just, that's just another, another piece of the puzzle now, um, you know, for financial service professionals to be aware of and to be say, we understand, we know, we don't want this to happen to you. I'm on your side. So you want to have some awareness of that, I don't know if somebody's going to come up with a product, of a financial exploitation insurance policy, you know, I'm sure, yeah, I can buy that, working on it somewhere, right, sure. So that's kind of one of the other things that's happening now, before was never a big, big deal. It's getting to be a bigger deal. Okay.

Suzanne Carawan 52:29 

Yeah. And on that note, I mean, we probably don't talk about this enough, but if you're a NAIFA member out there, we are one of the, I think there's only two or three of us who are the distribution partner to AARP, they have a financial exploitation kind of class called bank safe, and all NAIFA members can take that for free. So I'll just give a little plug there as a benefit. You're right on that one. I mean, you're absolutely right on that becoming such a target, right along with the cybersecurity and the need for all the identity fraud and whatnot.

Dr. John Migliaccio 53:01 

And it cuts across every economic level in the country.

Suzanne Carawan 53:07 

Yeah, and it's devastating. It's scary and all these things.

Dr. John Migliaccio 53:10 

Think of it this way, again, from the family side, and this is some older adult, you know, gets scammed to the level of a quarter of a million dollars going off to the scammers. That's a quarter of a million dollars not going to the family, not going to the kid, not going to the grandkids, right? Yeah, and so that has an impact. You talk about financial impact, because a lot of these folks, they're losing houses, you know, through one end of it, that's their major, maybe their only big asset up through people and even millionaires, has been the papers over the years, yeah, the last decade. So it cuts across everybody. And one of the things that I find really interesting in working with National Adult Protective Services is how much they have to struggle getting support from financial services organization. They beg for peanuts in this and those are the people on the front line.

And so I would offer that one way that the financial services industry in general, even at the local level, is to get out and support those folks with meaningful contributions to the work that they do. Yeah, because they've got to rely on the budget for the support that they get. And when you break it down to 50 states, it's like, it's laughable. So if you want to be a hero in your own local communities or even nationally, get behind the people that are out there. They're like your police force helping protect the money you know that you've worked so hard to help your clients have that slips away, literally overnight, in some cases, and it's not recoverable. So it's this big conglomerate of things. You can see all the different pieces. This is a giant jigsaw puzzle, and you really have to fill in all the pieces if you want to get the big picture.

Suzanne Carawan 55:17 

Well, John, I know we've come to kind of the time of our conclusion, but do you have kind of one we're going to go to the lightning round in just a second. But any one thing that you want to kind of leave NAIFA nation with, because that's, that's a great take home. We can get some resources out to everyone, yeah, but what other take home do you want?

Dr. John Migliaccio 55:32 

I mean, I think the hair standing up my arms right now, just thinking about the connection between FSP and NAIFA. I think NAIFA, it was not an organization that I was aware of and I've just been extremely impressed with the level of professionalism, with the level of attention, with the energy and just kind of great professional framework that it's providing in connection with financial services professionals, I would say, take advantage of financial gerontology. It's there for you. Now that you have access, you can go back 10 years on all the columns, right, anywhere from six to 12 columns a year on every component, every aspect of what we've been talking about with a highly academic professional attention. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, the financial Gerontology I write the column, my audience is the financial professionals in NAIFA and FSP, that's, that's who we write for. And so you can find in there a resource that's really, really, really important now available to everybody. So I would say, take advantage of it.

Suzanne Carawan 56:48 

That's great, too. So yeah, for everybody, if you are wondering, it's all inside the member portal, all you have to do is log in and all those back issues that John's referring to, they're all available digitally, etc. John, we're going to see you. I know we're going to plug you more into our I Reap Center and the Lifetime Health Care Center, and I hope you'll be a continuous contributor, and we can have more opportunity to talk with you in this kind of format. Also, John, is this true? You're going to be at FSP Institute. Yes. Come this January. Okay, so end of January, everybody, FSP Institute is just a jewel of a little conference that's going to happen this year in Nashville, and John will be one of the speakers.

So you can register for that online as well. So Chris Gandy is on travel today, but we would be remiss if we didn't quickly do the lightning round with you John, because he would say, like Suzanne, how are we going to know about John? So this is an opportunity to know you personally. There's no trick questions, just whatever comes top of mind. So here we go. You ready? John, yep, all right. Favorite food?

Dr. John Migliaccio 57:49 

Ravioli.

Suzanne Carawan 57:51 

Okay. Favorite sports team?

Dr. John Migliaccio 57:53 

I hate to say it, New York Giants. We're actually Yankees. I'll go with the Yankees,

Suzanne Carawan 57:57 

Okay, because they win sometimes. So, Oh, the poor Giants.

Dr. John Migliaccio 58:03 

Shame on you. Shame on you.

Suzanne Carawan 58:06 

I only said to shout out to Dennis Cucinelli, who's also a Giants fan, and always, always crying in his milk there about the Giants record. But we'll go with the Yankees. Okay, good. Um, favorite place you've ever traveled to?

Dr. John Migliaccio 58:20 

Italy.

Suzanne Carawan 58:22 

Italy. What part?

Dr. John Migliaccio 58:23 

Everywhere.

Suzanne Carawan 58:25 

And hence the ravioli.

Dr. John Migliaccio 58:27 

Yeah, you can't miss it.

Suzanne Carawan 58:29 

It wasn't better than grandmother's ravioli, something like that.

Dr. John Migliaccio 58:31 

I don't know, grandma would be kind of a little upset if I said yes, but it's right up there. Let me put it that way.

Suzanne Carawan 58:37 

It's right up there. All right. Excellent. What about favorite movie.

Dr. John Migliaccio 58:41 

Oh, my God, that's like him, like which? Which kid do you want to send away to wherever? Yeah, I would say the Wizard of Oz.

Suzanne Carawan 58:51 

Oh, the original, I'm sure. Right, yeah, yeah. All right, which one good, Good Witch, Glenda or the Wicked Witch of the West? Which one's your favorite?

Dr. John Migliaccio 58:59 

I think they both had their purpose, they both had their place, you know, you get, you got to have that. You got to have the unit.

Suzanne Carawan 59:06 

Good, evil. There no detention.

Dr. John Migliaccio 59:11 

But they both were great at their own jobs.

Suzanne Carawan 59:12 

They were, they were, if you had to go back in time and or if you were to have dinner with somebody, you can either have somebody who's living or no longer living. Who would you have dinner with and why?

Dr. John Migliaccio 59:28 

I would have dinner with my great-grandfather, who I never met. Don't know, and I would like to know more about him and how I got here.

Suzanne Carawan 59:44 

Oh, yeah, I have a similar right, because those things are again with we talked about legacy. How about we stop having the chain of the family be broken, because that's one thing hopefully that technology could do for us, because so many things are lost along the way, and we don't know. Yeah. Well, I know this, John, you're part of our family now, and we're happy to have you, and we want to keep that legacy going of financial gerontology. So we're happy that you're a member. If you're not a member, please join us. You can go to belong.naifa.org/join and become a member of our NAIFA FSP Life Happens, expanded family. But with that, John, we're looking forward to seeing you in person and a January FSP Institute and reading more of all your um problems that you have out there on financial, gerontology, and thank you on behalf of NAIFA, all the work you do.

Dr. John Migliaccio 1:00:31 

Thank you guys.

Suzanne Carawan 1:00:32 

Take care.

Outro 1:00:36 

Thanks for joining us for NAIFA's Advisor Today podcast series, make sure to subscribe to get future episodes, and if you're interested in coming on the show, let us know