As baby boomers have aged, they have accumulated more assets leading to more discretionary spending. Since retiring two years ago, Joan Harris has upped her travel game.Once or twice a year, she visits her two adult children in different states. She’s planning multiple other trips, including to a science fiction convention in Scotland and a Disney cruise soon after that, along with a trip next year to neolithic sites in Great Britain.“I really have more money to spend now than when I was working,” said Harris, 64, an engineer who worked 29 years for the federal government and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.Back then, she and her now-ex-husband were paying for their children’s college educations and piling money into savings accounts. Now, she’s splurging a bit and, for the first time, is willing to pay for first-class plane tickets. She plans to fly business class to Scotland and has arranged for a higher-level suite on the cruise.“I suddenly realized, with my dad getting old and my mom dying, it’s like, ‘No, you can’t take it with you,’ ” she said. “I could become incapacitated to the point where I couldn’t enjoy something like going to Scotland or going on a cruise. So I better do it, right?”Older Americans like Harris are fueling a sustained boost to the U.S. economy. Benefiting from outsize gains in the stock and housing markets over the past several years, they are accounting for a larger share of consumer spending — the principal driver of economic growth — than... Continue reading at 'Fast Company'
[ Fast Company | 2024-04-29 13:22:05 UTC ]
Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Fri, 25/03/2011 - 09:36 Academic retailers have demanded that academic publishers provide them with greater support, arguing that the current model is "not sustainable" in the long term. The development comes after Waterstone's m.d. Dominic Myers... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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