John Hancock Retirement CEO Wayne Park sits down with Alexandra Canal on Wealth! to discuss the firm’s recent retirement report and what it signals about the differences in retirement readiness across generations.
“What we have seen actually is things like inflation do matter. It is impacting the generations differently,” Park tells Yahoo Finance. “For the younger generation, certainly millennials, Gen Z, and Gen X, they feel really behind for a couple [of] reasons,” he says, highlighting inflation and difficulty balancing financial priorities.
Inflation is “taking an impact, and we see it in terms of inflows and people taking money out of their retirement plans.”
“Number two, especially for Gen X, is the number of different priorities that you have to deal with. Saving for your own retirement, saving for your children’s college, you may have a mortgage, and you may even have your own student debt left over. I think the strain of trying to meet all these different objectives is playing a role in feeling behind for retirement.”
On the other hand, Boomers “are most confident and probably in the better off situation because most of them have seen what that looks like and have access to financial professionals and access for help.”