Archive for category: Blogs

By: Mathew Greenwald
May 20, 2025

Over the past quarter-century or so, retirement has been evolving. For a growing number, it has bifurcated into two very distinct stages. These developments have largely been overlooked but have significant implications.

As late as a decade ago, when researchers at Greenwald Research asked retirees what they liked best about being retired we often heard “the alarm clock never goes off,” or “every day is Saturday.” When financial services companies marketed to retirees, they showed an older couple wandering aimlessly down a beach so often that the image became a cliché.

Retirement was seen as one stage of life and when people planned financially for retirement, they almost always planned for one unitary stage. Some saw a slow decline over time, in spending and in physical capabilities. These changes were considered small, incremental and continuous, with no major changes at any point, at least until there was a major illness or cognitive decline. But this period of ill-health did not, on average, last very long.

Nowadays, people leaving their work careers are increasingly seeking purpose, not leisure. They want to accomplish something meaningful. That something might be important societally or just to them individually. It may be a job or new career, it could be volunteering: but they want something that makes them want the alarm clock to go off and they do not want every day to be Saturday.

We can see this in a variety of ways.  Volunteering is up and likely to rise more. The forty-year decline in the age of retirement from the end of World War II to the mid-1980s reversed as people were and are less eager to enter a time of leisure.

But just as there has been a significant change in the first part of retirement, there has also been a significant shift in the back end. Life expectancy for older people is expanding. In 1960, the life expectancy of a 65-year-old man was 12.8 years. In 2021 it was 17 years. [1] There is, however, some evidence that the number of years retirees spend in bad health is also going up.[2]

Modern medicine has become effective at keeping healthy people alive long enough to get sick or cognitively impaired and keeping the sick and cognitively impaired alive longer. Chronic conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and dementia are increasing. The US Center for Disease Control study found that, in 2018, 64% of people ages 65 and over have at least two chronic conditions and it is clear the incidence increases with age.[3]

People now spend an average of 10 years with chronic conditions, such as cancer, heart disease, or dementia, which is about twice as long as during the 1960s.[4]

For many, retirement has been replaced by two stages, which I call “Rewirement” and “Elderhood.” More and more people who leave work want to make new connections and seek new activities. “Rewirement” describes that better than retirement, which basically means “to withdraw.” The extended time with chronic conditions leads to lives that are far different than people visualize when they think of retirement and far different that the years right after people end their work careers. It is a time of limitations and medical care. It is not really leisure, it is better called Elderhood.

The evolution toward these stages has a variety of implications. I will briefly comment on retirement planning. It was easy to plan for a period of leisure. It does not take much to plan for nothing. But seeking a meaningful and fulfilling role after a long-standing career is a complex task. Ross Andel, a professor at Arizona State University who studies cognitive aging and retirement stated, “The plan cannot be ‘I worked so hard for so long that I’m going to take this long vacation and then I’m going to figure it out.”[5]

Planning for Elderhood is also hard. Some people curtail activities and can live on Social Security. Others need expensive care and support. Fortunately, a number of new and very attractive (and expensive) housing options for the elderly have developed, including senior housing and assisted living. Those who financially plan for this last stage can often find a way to afford this housing and care.

Those who do not prepare properly often have less attractive housing and, if they develop a need for long-term care, may be forced to move into a second-class nursing home where they spend their last years sharing a room with a very sick roommate and spending their children’s inheritance.

The replacement of “retirement” with “rewirement” and “elderhood” for many can make the golden years even more golden than before, but the need for effective planning has also evolved.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266657/us-life-expectancy-for-men-aat-the-age-of-65-years-since-1960/

[2] “Life spans are growing but ‘health spans’ are shrinking. What that means for your money” Greg Iscurci, October 9, 2024, https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/09/life-spans-are-growing-but-health-spans-are-shrinking.html#:~:text=First%2C%20the%20good%20news%3A%20Americans,medical%20and%20financial%20experts%20say

[3] US Center for Disease Control, “ Prevalence of Multiple Chronic Conditions Among US Adults 2018, ” Research Brief, Volume 17, September 17, 2020, page 4

[4] Life spans are growing but ‘health spans’ are shrinking. What that means for your money” Greg Iscurci, October 9, 2024, https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/09/life-spans-are-growing-but-health-spans-are-shrinking.html#:~:text=First%2C%20the%20good%20news%3A%20Americans,medical%20and%20financial%20experts%20say

[5] “Staying Sharp After Retiring Is Its Own Job,” Mohana Rayvindranath, New York Times, March 28, 2025

By: Lisa Greenwald
04/29/2025

I inherited a healthy business and within a few years – like someone flipped a switch – things slowed. It wasn’t just us; research firms of all sizes and specialties experienced a couple of bad years. However, knowing I wasn’t alone didn’t really take the worry and guilt away.

Managing through and dealing with a change of staffing — “downsizing” your team – is something you never want to be faced with. There is never a right way to handle these decisions. They are difficult, from building a contingency plan to ensure business and client care continuity to knowing you are making decisions that will significantly impact the team you have built and who share your vision and goals.

Conducting a significant layoff in a small company has proven to be the most difficult and taxing experience of my career. I knew and cared about the people being laid off; they were my friends and mentors. To this day, my brain knows it was the right thing for the business and the remaining team, but my heart wishes it could’ve been different. I can’t imagine layoffs are easy at any company, but I assure you it’s complicated beyond what I can express, when you’ve quite literally grown up with your colleagues.

What I gleaned from the experience is that I will always be a leader who cares about the team Lisa Weber-Raley and I have built. They have helped build the very brand experience our clients have come to expect when working with us and we strive to deliver to them so they can achieve their business goals.  As Lisa has said many times to me “our people are the Greenwald brand” and that is what made this even more difficult for both of us, as we both believe in the people who shape our success every day.  I learned a lot from this experience. In downsizing, we had to use cold objectiveness and reason to sustain this amazing company, but privately, I hope to always maintain the emotional side, to always care. I don’t ever want to be the type of business leader that loses sight of people.

Maintaining a positive and optimistic outlook in the face of challenges is not only personally demanding but also critical for leading a team effectively. It was a hard thing to do when the chips were down, and it is the area in which I continue to need the most work. When my or my management team’s morale is down, the whole team feels it. When we stay positive, we can overcome these challenges, emerge stronger, more resilient, and ready for the next chapter.

There will be good times and times of challenge. It helps to be “battle-tested” — it gives Lisa and I the perspective we need to navigate the firm through all circumstances, staying true to who we are as leaders, and respecting the culture of collaboration and teamwork we have built within Greenwald.

By: Lisa Greenwald
04/15/2025

As Greenwald Research celebrates its 40^th anniversary year, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on my twenty plus years of experiences with the company. Nearly five years ago, I became the CEO of Greenwald Research. At that time, a mentor and colleague called me and my business partner Lisa Weber-Raley, our chief research officer, “battle-tested.” As I reflect on my twenty years with Greenwald and my first years of leading the company as CEO, “battle-tested” takes on a positive connotation of strength and leadership, and female leadership. Lisa and I know what a privilege it is to be able to move this reputable company forward but there are times I wish we weren’t so battle-tested…I will have more on that in future blogs in this series.

It is, without question, an honor to lead the company built in your family name. But leading a company “your dad” built and filling his shoes is not easy, especially since “dad” (I prefer to call him Matt) is a recognized expert in retirement research, is still with the firm, and now works for me.

The key mission and vision for the firm hasn’t changed much over the years. Greenwald has always sought to be a partner with industry leaders and experts to drive understanding and insights into action. We have always strived to help advance ideas and opportunities our clients have thought of, and to develop and bring new ideas forward that they haven’t. Since our inception in 1985 to today, our clients and the industries we serve have always been our North Star – we serve organizations trying to make positive contributions and changes in critical areas of American life – health and wealth.

As clients evolve to navigate the ever-changing needs of their businesses and clients, Greenwald has always been able to pivot within the industries we are a part of and grow along with the health and wealth sectors.

In our business, as with our clients’ businesses, relationships matter. At Greenwald, family relationships matter too, not just for me and Matt, but for every team member who deserves a healthy balance of both. But for a moment…imagine what our family dinners are like…Greenwald business will inevitably come up in conversation, and Matt and I can go on for some time about the firm – or fun topics like life expectancy/longevity, Social Security, the underappreciated HSA, and the finer points of DC income solutions — while our other family members wait patiently for us to “pass the potatoes.” But through it all, we have leveraged strong mutual respect to evolve as business partners and maintain a (somewhat) normal work/life balance.

Navigating a family business is not always easy. To some, I am merely “Matt’s daughter,” a title that intertwines occasional insult and genuine honor. Collaborating with family members demands a foundation of mutual respect. Matt and I planned Greenwald’s leadership transition for years. In the process, we disagreed, but not too often. At times, I admittedly took for granted the wisdom of a man who built the successful company and stellar reputation I now hold in my hands. I’ve since learned the errors of my ways. Our leadership transition came with pressure too. I used to joke I had big shoes to fill and had to do so with much smaller feet and in high heels – until I gained the confidence to forge my path (and realized flats are a lot more comfortable than heels anyway). Anyone who knows Matt and I can point out the many differences, but those who know us well can see important similarities and mutual respect for both.

Greenwald Research has met the changing dynamics of the business and our clients. Over the years, we have grown with our clients, and I am so grateful to have been able to witness the growth of the company as I grew as a professional to where I am today, privileged to be leading a team of professionals who bring their best to everything we do to meet the needs of others.

By: Mathew Greenwald
10/1/2024

Thought leadership research studies are widely used by asset managers, distribution companies, and insurance companies. The belief in the value of these studies is strong. My firm recently conducted a survey of executives in retirement companies and asked them about expected use of eight marketing tools. Seven in ten said they expected their use of thought leadership research to grow over the next three years, more than for any other marketing tool or process.

Despite this widespread use, it is my firm’s observation that thought leadership programs often do not achieve their potential benefit. To be most effective, thought leadership initiatives should achieve three basic objectives:

1. Impact an audience that is important to the company.
2. Study a topic that is both important and challenging to the target audience. The study should be on a topic that the target market wants to address more effectively.
3. Provide information and insights that help the audience achieve their objectives.

There is one obvious reason for the need to provide information that helps the target audience meet its objectives: financial professionals, consumers, and other possible targets of thought leadership want to do better on key endeavors and will value those who provide information and insights that help them do that. The days of providing information that is simply “nice-to-know” are long gone.

Unfortunately, I have seen thought leadership efforts that do not appear to have been designed to meet these objectives, but designed only to produce information that is interesting or get press attention. My main concern is that studies conducted for this purpose do not provide the value that can be achieved by the same level of expenditure as a more effectively designed and executed study.

To get the highest potential impact, three key steps are needed.

1. Impact an audience that is important to the company.

First, it is important to identify a target audience for the thought leadership effort that will provide maximum value to the company. Sometimes the target can be very narrow, such as a particular distribution channel that a company wants to penetrate: Pure RIAs, for example. Sometimes the target can be broader, such as financial professionals from all channels who have clients in the company’s target market: for example, financial professionals with clients who are retired. It is important that the target for the thought leadership effort not be too broad, however. The target can be a segment of consumers, but thought leadership programs aimed at all consumers tend to be too broad and generalized in the value they provide.

A segment of financial professionals is often the target of a thought leadership program because that is where the benefit to the financial services company is most direct. Information from an effective thought leadership program can help wholesalers and others get access to financial professionals and give them a value add that will enhance the relationship between the financial professional and the wholesaler or the company.  It can help company representatives get invitations to make presentations to a financial professional’s clients. It can enhance the image of a company. It can motivate a financial professional to share publications of research findings with their clients thereby producing value for the financial professional and end consumer.

2. Study a topic that is both important and challenging to the target audience.

The second step, as stated, is to choose a subject that goes beyond being simply interesting. It should be on a complex issue the target audience is, to at least a certain extent, struggling with. Examples include how financial professionals can best formulate relationships with their clients’ adult children, how they should establish asset level goals for retirees, or how consumers should formulate goals for their retirement years.

3. Provide information and insights that help the audience achieve their objectives.

The third step is, in our opinion, the most differentiating. There are many studies, maybe most particularly in the retirement area, that provide information which is interesting but simply do not provide new insights that help the target audience better meet their objectives. One example is the many studies that indicate that many are not saving enough for retirement. These studies are often interesting, but they would be a lot more effective if they helped financial advisors better motivate or guide their clients or helped develop new tools to help individuals better assess how much they should save to meet, or set, lifestyle goals in retirement.

Understanding Your Target Audience for Thought Leadership

A good thought leadership study will go beyond producing interesting information: it will help the target audience better meet their goals. Financial professionals, pre-retirees, and retirees, for example, face a number of challenges. A good thought leadership study will help them address one of those challenges.

Designing research that produces this benefit requires a deep understanding of:

• the issue being confronted, such as retirement planning

• how the issue is now being addressed and areas in which improvements should be made

• the target audience’s satisfaction with current approaches and their interest in new ideas

With these understandings, thought leadership programs can be constructed that provide very significant value.

By: Eric Sondergeld
9/10/2024

Check out almost any life insurance needs calculator and it is obvious that the largest component of the answer is an amount representing some multiple of income. Amounts are also typically included for immediate payoff of outstanding debt, college education, final expenses, and even items such as childcare and an emergency fund.

Other than digitizing these formulas in the form of online calculators, the theory behind them has remained largely unchanged for decades. Before that, we likely used rules of thumb of income multiples, many of which are commonly used in practice today. I see two main problems with this approach to estimating life insurance needs. First, the amount becomes quickly outdated. As time passes, fewer years of income replacement are needed, children may no longer be dependents, incomes have grown, debt gets paid down, or a larger home is purchased with a bigger mortgage, etc.  Second, if income replacement is indeed the largest component of the life insurance benefit, then why is the benefit not paid as an income?

There’s a way to address both of these issues. The first requires an admission that there’s a fair amount of double-counting going on in the current approach. If life insurance provides replacement income (whether paid in a lump sum or over time), that income presumably is currently being used to pay down debt, save for children’s college, etc. I can’t believe nobody has stopped to ask, “why do I need to replace my income AND some of the things it pays for?” or “Why is 10 years of income replacement the norm?” The second is to change the terminology from “death benefit” to “income amount.” If life insurance is to truly be an income replacement product, we need to present it and talk about it that way. For products intended to primarily replace income, we might eliminate the term “face amount” from our vocabulary. Instead, the conversation should be about how much income is needed and for how long.

The how much starts with your annual income and subtracting an amount for taxes (since the death benefit is not taxable) and perhaps a bit more since the income won’t need to support the insured after he or she has passed. In addition, an assumption for income growth can be incorporated. The length of time could be a number of years or, preferably, to a specific age. For example, a 40-year-old whose youngest child is 10 might expect to support that child until they reach age 22 and are out of college. That parent might buy coverage that replaces their income until they are 52. Another example is to replace income until an expected retirement age if there are one or more members of the household (or household expenses such as mortgage payments) reliant on that income. The life insurance benefit would be expressed as a monthly amount, just like with disability income insurance.

In fact, all the above ways of defining the benefit already exist within the disability income market. And like disability income insurance, the concept of face amount is a foreign one. The only remnant of one in this approach might be allowing for a modest lump sum benefit to cover final expenses. An added benefit is that the life insurance conversation dovetails nicely with the disability income insurance conversation. Creative companies could even develop a combination product that replaces income until retirement age, potentially at different amounts depending on whether the insured is disabled or dead.

Presenting life insurance as an income replacement solution offers the following additional benefits:

• The death benefit and its intent become clearer to beneficiaries, as it’s simply a continuation of the income that has supported them all along.
• Beneficiaries don’t have to figure out how to manage a lump sum payment, something people are generally not great at doing.
• It simplifies the conversation and removes complicated factors like amounts for debt and education and having to decide whether the income replacement (that is paid as a lump sum) should last (or more accurately, represent) seven, ten, or twenty years.

Making life insurance the true income replacement vehicle its meant to be requires a shift in thinking, benefit calculation, and terminology. Its positives are clear and can make purchasing life insurance easier for customers.