Financial gerontology is a multidisciplinary field of study encompassing both academic and professional education, that integrates research on aging and human development with the concerns of finance and business.
Over the years Gregg's intellectual experience as dean and president encouraged him to expand the college's distance education curriculum beyond the CLU designation which focused substantially on life insurance.
The same year, the trustees voted to move the institute from The American College and accept an invitation to become affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences.
The increasing wealth span complexity, however, is found in the dramatic change in the kind of pensions held by American workers: Defined Benefit (DB plans) vs.
[13][14] These demographically and financiallynew "senior sandwich" responsibilities of middle-agers can have substantial impact on their expenditure stage years, as they are now caring for elderly parents just as they are planning for and entering their own later life.
Further exacerbating this complexity, senior sandwich generation responsibilities extend the personal financial impact of older-age longevity to the middle-age children of elderly parents.
This integration is well illustrated by an emerging literature of Financial Gerontology that has been developing over the last twenty-five years, including articles, books, and special issues of academic journals.
The wealth span concept is drawn from Nobel prize-winning economist Franco Modigliani's life cycle saving-spending hypothesis and became a continuing aspect of the Boettner Institute's research and teaching, as noted earlier.
The one-volume publication includes over 150 authors each providing a two- to five-page article on a subject relevant to one of eight core topics: Economic and Income Security; Employment, Work, and Retirement; Family and Intergenerational Issues; Financial Advice, Investments, and Consumer Services; Health Care and Health Insurance; Housing and Housing Finance; Legal Issues and Services; Quality of Life and Well-Being.
While a core purpose continued to be as a resource for researchers and teachers, the new edition signals the growth of Financial Gerontology as a component of professional education.
As Vitt writes in the Preface: "My experience in consumer financial education during the past several years led to this revised edition, which has been expanded to include many additional topics about preretirement and retirement issues.
Included in the new edition are entries that span the array of employer sponsored health and retirement benefits, which are increasingly central to working Americans and to their partners and family members.
There is a great need for this financial knowledge to reach the many professionals who advise, support, sell products to, serve, assist, and teach mid-life and later-life clients."
In 2002 the J.K. LasserPro division of Wiley published the first textbook in Financial Gerontology, under the title Advising Mature Clients: The New Science of Wealth Span Planning.
Following a detailed review of the different "kinds" of aging the book focuses directly on the how changes in the stages of the wealth span affect individual financial attitudes and behavior.
In addition to the development of text and handbooks, the broader academic and interdisciplinary recognition of a new field or subfield is evidenced also by the publication of special topical issues of major disciplinary journals.
Founded in 1954, the ASA's membership of 5,000 professionals includes educators and researchers alongside service providers, program administrators, business executives, policy makers, and students.
A recipient of the American Society on Aging's Cavanagh Award for Excellence in Education and Training, Timmermann was Executive Director of the MetLife Mature Market Institute from 1997 to 2013.
Following Cutler's "retirement" from the column, John N. Migliaccio was selected by the Journal as the third permanent author of "Financial Gerontology" sharing the bimonthly schedule with Timmermann.
Since 1990, the range of topics and titles collectively reflects what could be seen as a full introductory university course in gerontology offered to the financial services professional (albeit without formal exams and credits).
In many areas of human attitudes and behavior—financial, social, political, personal—the differences between younger and older people may be caused not by their aging but by their generation, their birth cohort, their personal exposure to a slice of history when they were growing up.
Several of the columns illustrate how the financial professional can at times act as a kind of geriatric consultant to their clients, including: “Alzheimer's Disease as 'Normal Aging'-- Retirement Planning and the New Longevity” (November 1993); Caring For Elderly Parents: Where Do You Look For Help?
As noted in the discussion of the Boettner Institute, the basic model was not to teach finance but to introduce, explain, illustrate, the value of gerontology to professionals already providing financial services to clients.
In recent years, as the program grew nationally, about a third of AIFG students came from other finance-related occupations, including lawyers, accountants, stock brokers, retirement advisers, social services administrators, and even some financial journalists.
AIFG 101 also introduces the student to different ways of understanding national (and international) population dynamics that demonstrate the gerontological demographics influencing individuals, families, social policies, and their combined impact on financial issues.
Part of the course elaborates the procedural nuts and bolts of serving and protecting the interests of older persons, e.g., guardianships, conservatorships, powers of attorney, trusts.
Of the hundreds of students who completed the AIFG's Registered Financial Gerontologist (RFG) program, one was a Korean banker and entrepreneur studying for his Master of Science degree in Gerontology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro (UNCG).
The National Health Insurance Act, enacted in 1977, initially focused on workers in large companies, later expanded to other employment sectors, reaching universal coverage by 1989.
An additional complication is that Korean pension benefits are often paid as lump sum annuities, placing even more responsibility on the retiree for balancing financial issues with older-age planning.
Through a set of working groups involving JR, CASS, and AIFG, substantial adaptation is being made to reflect the current financial, demographic, and policy contours of the Chinese aging society.