Later this week I’ll be at the The Educational Travel Conference (ETC), Jan. 19-22 in Orlando, Florida. ETC is the founding conference for Alumni, Museum, Zoo, Conservation, and Nonprofit Educational Travel. It hosts 450 delegates who are a highly-qualified international group of nonprofit travel planners, suppliers, specialty tour operators and destinations. They assemble to focus on the development, operation and marketing of group educational, experiential and affinity travel worldwide.

I am looking forward joining Kathy Dragon, Doris Gallan and Heather Hardwick Rhodes for several agenda sessions there on Friday Jan. 20:

• Going Past 40: How Today’s Baby Boomers are Traveling and Making their Buying Decisions, 9:30 – 10:50 a.m.
• Boomer Product Development: Go Broader, Go Deeper by Appealing to Core Values of the 40+, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
• Prime Time Travelers: Diving Into The Digital/Social Component Of the Boomer Marketplace,  4:15 – 5:30 p.m

Learn more about The Educational Travel Conference (ETC) here.

In A Brutal Economy, Boomers Rewrite The Next Chapter

11/16/2011
(This story appears in the Dec. 5, 2011 issue of Forbes.)

The recently released MetLife Report on American Grandparents revealed that 1 in 10 households is headed by a grandparent with at least one grandchild living there. The study reports that part of the reason for this is high rates of unemployment among the children’s parents. Interestingly, in 1980 there were only 28 million Americans living in a household that included two adult generations or a grandparent and at least one other generation. By 2008 the number was 49 million Americans living inter-generationally.

In a recent New York Times story about this trend, Kermit Baker, a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard and the chief economist of the American Institute of Architects, said, “Immigrants are a source of growing demand (for intergenerational homes), and their household composition is different in fundamental ways from the domestic-born.”

[Read more →]

Date: Tuesday, October 25
Time: 3:45 – 5:15 p.m.
Where: Hyatt Regency, Orange County, CA

This session will provide key strategies to effectively communicate with strong influencers in the decision making process – the adult children/caregivers, integral to the selection and sales process. Learn how understanding the values of decision makers and trends and differences in sentiment towards Assisted Living communities can help drive your marketing strategy. Discover a messaging framework needed to engage and increase your prospect base.

Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM (Central Time)
Speaker: Mark Miller, retirement journalist and author of The Hard Times Guide to Retirement Security: Practical Strategies for Money, Work and Living.
Registration: click here
Cost: free for members; $50 for non-members Fee waived for this webinar!
About the webinar: The huge American baby boom generation is entering retirement just as the economy has pivoted in a direction most didn’t anticipate. The housing crash, high jobless rate, faltering entitlement programs and volatile stock markets have created new challenges for a generation that had been somewhat blasé in its approach to retirement planning in the pre-crash days. Now, Boomers are struggling to adjust to what is shaping up as a prolonged period of economic challenge. Join us as retirement journalist and author Mark Miller discusses his book, The Hard Times Guide to Retirement Security: Practical Strategies for Money, Work and Living. He’ll outline the key trends affecting Boomers’ personal finances, career and lifestyle trends.

For this article Can Empty Nesters Still Afford to Splurge? in the current issue of SmartMoney, I spoke with writer Missy Sullivan about the empty nesters’ mentality.

I’m pleased to have been asked by Allstate, one of the nation’s largest auto, home and life insurers also known for their “You’re in good hands” slogan, to be a guest blogger on their Allstate Blog.

In my first post, It’s Not Our Parent’s Middle Age, I’ve written about a trend that we have been tracking for the last two years, patterns of independent behavior among boomer couples (that is different from our parents’ generation) and the actions they are taking – some of these may surprise you!

The ninth show, The Business of…Navigating Midlife Transitions, we have guest Barbara Waxman, an executive and life coach, who has been called “America’s favorite coach for midlife and better”, and founder of The Odyssey Group. She excels at executive coaching for people in the C suite, and for helping these highly motivated people find the balance between their work and life. Barbara has a Masters in both public administration and gerontology – and is an expert in adult development and aging. She is certified by the International Coach Federation and the Hudson Institute, and is a member of the Global Institute for Leadership Development’s coaching faculty. She has appeared in AARP the magazine, Fortune, Newsday and US News and World Report and on CNBC.com, eharmony.com, SmartMoney.com and Leeza Gibbons’ Hollywood Confidential.

Read more and listen to the show →

The eighth show, The Business of… Social Entrepreneurship and Legacy, we have guests from two organizations that are organized around the principles of social entrepreneurship and the idea of leaving a legacy for future generations. For those of us unfamiliar with the concept of social entrepreneurship, a social entrepreneur sees a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to create and manage a venture that achieves social change. While an entrepreneur is motivated by profit, a social entrepreneur has a goal of furthering social and environmental goals. The nearly 80 million Baby Boomers in the United States are embracing these concepts as they age. The concept of leaving a legacy is vitally important as people age and move emotionally toward the idea of “self actualization.” And older people internalize this in wildly different ways. Some choose to teach, some start families, and many are pointing their energy to organizations that will improve the world socially and environmentally.

We speak with our first guest, Jim Emerman, Executive Vice President of Civic Ventures, a think tank focusing on boomers, work and social purpose. Civic Ventures has led the charge to engage millions of boomers to be a force for change, and show the value of experience in solving serious social problems – everything from education to the environment to homelessness. Before assuming the role as executive vice president, Jim developed and directed The Purpose Prize – which is highly praised – it is a $17 million program designed to recognize and invest in social entrepreneurs who are over 60 and working to solve problems in their communities, the country and the world. Prior to Civic Ventures, Jim was chief operating officer of American Society of Aging, the largest association of professionals working with and on behalf of older adults.

Our second guest is Randy Paynter, founder, President and CEO of Care2, the largest online community of people passionate about making a difference, with 15 million members and 400 non-profit.