The New Retirement Economy

When Ingram’s first began its annual examination of retirement-planning trends in 2011—as the first Baby Boomers turned 65—the conversation revolved around accumulation: How much should you save? What percentage should be in stocks? Would Social Security remain solvent? Could a nest egg survive a market correction?

Those questions remain important 15 years later, as the tail end of that demographic tidal wave dissipates. But they no longer define retirement. Today, retirement has become something much larger than a financial milestone. It is increasingly an economic force—one that influences labor markets, health-care systems, housing demand, philanthropy, business ownership and wealth management itself.

“The trend line is constantly changing,” said Jamie Battmer, chief investment officer for Creative Planning, the Overland Park-based wealth-management giant. “The traditional concepts around retirement have changed dramatically as we’ve drifted much more toward a service-based economy than a hard-labor one. And that changes what someone is going to need in retirement—financially, and for their emotional livelihood.”

That shift is visible across the country, but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in regions like Kansas City, where an aging population intersects with a labor market already struggling to replace experienced workers.

Demographers have spent years warning about the arrival of the Baby Boom generation into retirement. Now the wave is here. More than 11,000 Americans a day are crossing age 65, and by 2031 every member of the Baby Boom generation will be at least that age. The percentage of Americans over 65 continues to climb and is projected to exceed one-fifth of the population within the next decade.

The implications reach far beyond retirement accounts. For employers, retirement increasingly means workforce disruption. For commercial real estate developers, it means shifting demand. For hospitals and health systems, it means rapidly growing service needs. For financial advisers, it means helping clients navigate a retirement that may last 30 years instead of 10 or 15.

And for business owners, it raises a question that often receives less attention than it deserves: Who takes over when the founder leaves?

The retirement story of 2026 is therefore not primarily about retirees. It is about everyone else.

The Work-Force Question

For much of the past two decades, economic development discussions focused on attracting jobs. Today, many employers would settle for finding qualified, engaged workers, period. The retirement wave is one reason why.

Across the country, labor-force participation has been pulled downward by the growing number of retirees leaving the work force. Retirement now accounts for roughly half of all Americans who are not participating in the labor force, and the ratio of retirees to new entrants continues to widen.

That dynamic is particularly im-portant for industries dependent on experience. Manufacturing firms need supervisors. Engineering firms need project leaders. Hospitals need nurses, clinicians and administrators. Construction companies need estimators and superintendents.

These positions are difficult to replace because they are built on decades of accumulated knowledge.

Kansas City employers have spent years discussing talent attraction. Increasingly, they are confronting a different challenge: knowledge retention. The issue, then, is not merely replacing workers. It is replacing judgment.

The wealth-management industry itself offers a revealing case study—and a contrarian one. The sector faces its own retirement wave, with a large cohort of advisers who built 40-year careers now approaching the exits. Battmer, for one, isn’t mourning all of those departures.

“Frankly, there’s a high percentage that should retire,” he said. “For the average investor, there’s often a net negative, especially with the older cohort, which is often still adhering to a stockbroker mentality. People with a 40-year career often have an adherence to a model that never actually created a benefit for clients.”

Even so, the exits create the same replacement pressure felt across other sectors. “There’s always a need for talent,” Battmer said. The difference lies in the hiring profile: Firms like his are recruiting less for salesmanship and more for analytical discipline.

“We expand our reach by looking for people who are focused on things that are objective—accounting, for example—people who look through an objective lens, instead of someone who comes out and just wants to sell something,” he said.

The Succession Challenge

Retirement is also creating one of the most significant business-transition events in modern history. Thousands of privately held companies remain controlled by Baby Boomer owners.

Many were founded decades ago; many continue to generate substantial revenues. And, almost paradoxically, many have no formal succession plan.

Historically, owners often assumed a family transition would occur naturally. Increasingly, that assumption is proving incorrect. Children frequently pursue different careers, and often have no interest in operating the business. Others simply lack the experience required to assume leadership.

The result is a growing reliance on alternative exits, including employee stock-ownership plans, private-equity transactions, strategic acquisitions and outright closures.

For a region like Kansas City, where entrepreneurial companies have long been an economic engine, retirement planning increasingly overlaps with economic-development planning.

The Wealth Transfer

Another historic shift is already underway. Economists and wealth advisers refer to it as the Great Wealth Transfer. Over the next two decades, tens of trillions of dollars are expected to move from older generations to younger heirs and charitable causes. Estimates commonly range from roughly $84 trillion to more than $100 trillion.

That transfer has generated enormous attention within the wealth-management industry. Yet the story is more complicated than inheritance alone.

Longer lives mean longer retirements. Longer retirements mean more spending. Medical costs, long-term-care expenses and caregiving needs may consume a larger portion of accumulated wealth than many families have previously anticipated.

The transfer will occur—nothing will stop that—but the timing, size and beneficiaries may differ substantially from expectations.

Take housing, for example. For years, residential development focused heavily on first-time buyers and family formation. Now a different demographic force is emerging. Older Americans are downsizing, aging in place, moving closer to family members, seeking walkable environments or evaluating senior-living options. Analysts have long described this demographic trend as a “silver tsunami” affecting housing demand nationwide.

That shift influences everything from suburban housing inventory to multifamily development and senior-living construction. For commercial developers, retirement has become a real-estate story.

The New Longevity Business

Perhaps the most important change is conceptual. For generations, retirement planning focused primarily on investment performance. Today’s challenge is longevity.

A 65-year-old can reasonably expect retirement to span decades rather than years. That changes everything—starting with the oldest rule of thumb in the book.

“The classic model—you’re 65 years old, so 65 percent in bonds—has been intensely flawed from the get-go,” Battmer said. “And it’s more pronounced now as the fastest-growing demographic nears retirement with longer lifetimes. You don’t know how much time you have left, so tilting into the aggressive side to support that potential longevity is paramount.”

“People now stay invested in public and private equities much longer, because that’s what’s going to give you the highest likelihood of a successful outcome,” Battmer said. He is quick to note the ride is not smooth: “At any given moment, a dislocation can occur. Over the last 25 years, we’ve had three different 30 percent pullbacks.”

On the strictly financial side of the ledger, Battmer argues that one variable remains chronically underweighted in retirees’ thinking: taxes.

“The biggest trend line is to properly manage tax optimization, which is so often overlooked,” he said. “If you’re only looking at what you want to take out, that’s a misfire 100 percent of the time, because you’re not optimizing the fact that there are lots of ways to minimize your tax obligations with this fund you’ve worked hard to accumulate.” Unlike market returns, he notes, that variable is entirely within a retiree’s control.

But the longevity era is stretching the adviser’s job description well beyond allocation and tax tables, says Scott Boswell, who joined MTC Holding Corporation, the parent company of Midwest Trust, after a career spent advising institutions, families and business owners—and after a brief retirement of his own.

“The best advisers aren’t simply managing investments,” Boswell said. “They’re helping clients navigate major life transitions. That means having conversations about family dynamics, charitable giving, business succession, legacy planning and how financial resources can help accomplish what matters most.”

The Executive Blind Spot

For the executives and business owners who make up much of the region’s wealth-holding class, the longevity math collides with a habit of mind that Battmer sees constantly—and considers the single costliest error in retirement planning.

“The biggest thing—it happens all the time—is that people disproportionately think, ‘I have to have a large chunk of assets in concentrated investments,’” he said. “All they’re really doing over the long run is guaranteeing lower portfolio values. You need to be focused on the long run, especially those in a position where their time horizon needs to extend even beyond what it’s been in the past.”

Successful people, in other words, tend to over-trust the asset that made them successful, at precisely the moment their planning horizon demands diversification. And Battmer reserves particular criticism for how the industry has framed safety itself.

“The financial industry has misguided so many for too long with ‘these are the safest investments,’” he said. “That strategy is the most dangerous, because it increases the likelihood that your portfolio will not reach its full potential. There’s been a massive outperformance of equities, and that produces a recency bias. But if you draw back 100 years, keeping money in cash and ultra-low-risk investments—after inflation, you’re barely breaking even.”

Boswell sees a second executive blind spot—one that has nothing to do with allocation, and one he discovered by retiring and then coming back.

“Most executives are good at preparing financially but spend far less time preparing personally,” he said. “They build retirement portfolios but not retirement identities. Financial independence creates choices, but it doesn’t tell us what will make those choices meaningful.”

His prescription borrows the language of the boardroom. “Throughout my career, I reviewed financial balance sheets. Retirement taught me that each of us also has a life balance sheet. Financial assets are important, but so are relationships, physical and mental health, faith, continued learning and opportunities to contribute. The healthiest retirements are the ones where both balance sheets are in good order.”

A Different Kind of Retirement

Perhaps the biggest misconception about retirement is that it represents withdrawal. In reality, older Americans remain deeply engaged in economic life. They continue working, they volunteer, they provide caregiving and support family members. They contribute significant purchasing power to local economies.

“Retirement is becoming less of a destination and more of a transition,” Boswell said. “People are living longer, healthier and more active lives. Many aren’t interested in simply stopping work—they want the freedom to choose different work.” Some teach or consult, he notes; others mentor, serve on nonprofit boards or launch businesses.

Boswell counts himself in that column. “I didn’t return because I needed another job,” he said of his own re-entry. “I returned because I realized I still had something to contribute.”

AARP’s most recent analysis found that Americans over 50 generate enormous economic value not only through employment and consumption but through unpaid caregiving and volunteer activities as well.

And as Kansas City confronts continuing work-force shortages, business transitions, nagging housing challenges and the largest generational wealth transfer in history, retirement planning becomes something larger than personal finance—it becomes regional planning, an issue worthy of more attention from the civic and public sectors as a matter of policy.

Kansas City, 2040

What does this region look like farther down the road if today’s trends simply run their course? Battmer’s answer blends optimism about technology with a warning about preparedness.

“The hope is that tech will solve for a lot of that,” he said. “AI now can make radiologists five times as productive as they used to be. So we’re hoping to create productivity enhancements broadly. But if you’re on the brink of retirement and don’t have the right type of consulting, that’s going to be a problem, and it will produce further strain on an entire system that’s already under stress.”

Boswell reads the same demographic hand and sees an asset where others see only strain.

“Our community is filled with experienced leaders who have decades of accumulated knowledge, relationships and wisdom,” he said. “If we create opportunities for those individuals to continue mentoring, serving, teaching and contributing, our businesses and nonprofit organizations will become even stronger. Kansas City is a community where retirement isn’t viewed as stepping away from significance, but stepping into a new season of contribution.”

Two answers, one conclusion: Preparation will determine whether the retirement economy becomes a burden on this region or one of its greatest resources. Or, as Boswell distills it: “Great financial planning isn’t about helping people retire. It’s about helping people live intentionally.”

For millions of Americans, the retirement economy has arrived, whether they’re ready for it or not. The question is whether institutions, businesses and individuals are prepared for what comes next.

PUBLISHED JULY 2026