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Will You Be One Of America’s New Authors? One of 200 Million.

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I am busy publishing my book as an eBook in Amazon’s KDP program and as a print-on-demand paperback using its CreateSpace platform. Down to the final details.

As part of the launch, I have written a 5,000 word white paper on my publishing process to help other fledgling authors give birth to their first book. I’ll get the paper up on the website in a couple of days. In the meantime, I cannot stress enough that we are experiencing an explosion in self-published books. Here are a couple of related facts:

According to the PEW Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project For Research: “As of February 2012, 21% of Americans had read an eBook, and that owners of e-readers read an average of eight books a year more than people without the devices (24 vs. 16).”

 The New York Times reported “According to a recent survey, 81 percent of people feel that they have a book in them…and should write it.” If you do the math, that represents over 200 million people in the U.S. who want to write a book in their lifetime.

Add the ease and low cost of self-publishing to the 200 million and you see why eBook revenues will soar. Here are some statistics.

The American Retirement Savings Deficit Meets China

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A central theme in “Boomercide” is our retirement savings deficit. According to Retirement USA, the difference between what Americans will need for retirement and what they have actually saved is $6.6 trillion.

The Employee Benefit Research Institute reports on the average retirement savings of various age groups. The current figures are scary:

Workers ages 45-54 have saved just under $44,000.

Baby boomers, those aged 55-64, have approximately $65,000 in savings.

People 65+ have saved $56,000. If you retire at 65 and live to 85, that $56,000 doesn’t go very far.

According to Reuters’ article “China slides faster into pensions black hole”, it looks looks like we are not alone. China is graying a an incredibly fast pace and the one child policy is a major issue. Here are some of their numbers:

“Policy makers and economists have long been worried about the financial burden of China’s expanding patchwork of pension schemes, but those concerns have recently escalated as its rural pension scheme took off in the past three years.

The funding shortage is daunting: economists say it could blow out to a whopping $10.8 trillion in the next 20 years from $2.6 trillion in 2010, towering over China’s $3 trillion onshore savings, the biggest hoard of domestic savings in the world.

Funding shortfalls hit 16.5 trillion yuan in 2010, the two economists said, and will quadruple to a stunning 68.2 trillion yuan by 2033. That is about 40 percent of China’s gross domestic product, assuming its economy grows 6 percent a year.

Unless China diverts 80 percent of dividends from listed state firms to pension funds to balance the pension account by 2050, they said, the nation may suffer “enormous fiscal stress”.”

College Costs Gone Wild!

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No question, one of the more wonderful shared Baby Boomer experiences has been paying for college education. I have two kids and they went to private four-year colleges. Cost? Tuition + food + housing + allowance = (?) lets say $450,000. Whenever I mention this to other parents, I get those wonderful all-knowing shared twisted smiles. I also love mentioning these numbers to my friends with younger kids. Yes, I am a sadist.

Now, don’t get me that wrong. I happily paid for my Kids to go to University of San Francisco and Bard College. There is absolutely no question that they benefited from their college experiences. As a business owner I interviewed lots of graduates. Many of whom couldn’t think critically, talk or write. My kids can actually do these things and do them very well. But, $450,000 makes me feel like an idiot.

What really blows my mind is that our generation let the price of  college go stratospheric. We allowed college administrators and faculty to over-design expensive campus buildings and over pay academics. The overall inflation rate since 1986 increased 115%. On the other hand, during the same time, tuition increased a whopping 498%.

What are the colleges really going to get for soaking us? Fewer students, jobs and even fewer colleges. Just as newspaper classifieds and record stores (remember them?) were disinter-mediated by Craigslist and iTunes, so will over-priced colleges get nailed by new online college competitors like Coursera. Coursera’s tagline? Take the World’s Best Courses, Online, For Free.

Baby Boomers May Opt For Communes (Again)

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I didn’t ever live in a commune. I visited a few in the 1970’s in California, Massachusetts and Vermont. But the lifestyle just didn’t do it for me. A bit too cozy?  Too “hippy”? Too smiley? Too many vegetables? Who knows. But, it did occur to me recently that people over, say 60, could actually start to think through the benefits of communal living to share costs, space and to connect. As many people realize, it gets harder and harder to connect once you’ve gotten past college, having kids in school and even moving around the country. It is simply more difficult to make close friends.

So, when I saw the article “Baby boomers may opt for communal living again” I did a Huh! Like, why not?

The article points out that we are witnessing a significant societal shift: millions of people are heading to 65+ (10,000 turn 65+ every day), they don’t live near their kids and they want independence. But, that independence does not have to mean living alone (or, oh shit, in a retirement home.)

Baby Boomers said that they were going to change the world. Well, they are: “By force of sheer volume, the (baby boomers) who in 1968 thought they would change the world by 2028 actually will,” said Andrew Carle, founding director of the Program in Senior Housing Administration at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

What might I want in a communal experience?

Scenario 1: I see myself living in a tropical land (Chiang Mai Thailand?; San Miguel de Allende Mexico)  in my own cabin in a chain of cabins that share communal services. Food, gardening, media…. brains, conversation, who knows.

Scenario 2: I live in an apartment in a large house in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg. This one is a bit more about intellectual stimulation.

The bottom line is that my buddies and I could share some universal services, living costs and laughs. Sure sounds better than moving into Happy Acres Nursing Home.

 

 

 

 

Are Bernanke And The Fed Killing Baby Boomers Via Low Interest Rates?

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It is very hard for most of us to remember the days when your savings could safely grow via double digit interest rates. In the 1980’s you could generate 18%, in the 1990’s 8%. Today? How does 1.05% for a 1 year CD sound?

18% wow. Hey, if you had just $200,000 in savings you would have generated $36,000 per year in cash and add that to say $25,000 in Social Security and you could live real well in Mexico on an annual income of $60,000. I know you can do math. But, I like this one. if you had $1,000,000 in retirement savings then your bank or bond would send you $180,000 per year. Now we are talking France.

Today? Nada baby. Assuming a 2% rate of inflation you are way screwed if you have moved a good chunk of you dough into under 2% yielding fixed income securities. You are running a negative program.

Could the Fed’s monetary policy be killing people? All I know is that suicides by Baby Boomers 65+ is on the increase.