Ken Dychtwald tells senior-housing industry boomers shun the word 'senior'

Federal Reserve data show boomers hold more than $97 trillion in wealth

Dychtwald, tan and fit in a black T-shirt and gray suit, addressed the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care conference in Chicago in October, telling the ballroom of industry workers that the boomers soon to fill their buildings will demand attention. “Get ready for the complaining,” Dychtwald said to audience laughter. “Get ready for the demands.”

The 76-year-old has forecast the ascendance of aging boomers for decades as a public speaker and boardroom consultant, and he said the moment he long predicted has arrived. Selling things to older people was once an afterthought for companies, but the boomer generation’s size, wealth and desire to spend freely have made these customers increasingly desirable.

According to the Federal Reserve, boomers currently hold more than $97 trillion in wealth, more than twice as much as the next-richest generation, Gen X. In the past year alone, boomers gained $12 trillion in wealth.

Dychtwald got his start in California’s New Age scene. A fan of science fiction, he has tried for years to predict what the world would look like with boomers as the most consequential group of older consumers yet. In a 1989 book, one of 19 he has written, he wrote that “the coming ‘age wave’ will challenge and shake every aspect of our personal, social and political dynamics.”

Top executives eventually turned to Dychtwald for advice selling to the graying population. He advised Chrysler chief executive Lee Iacocca that the then-middle-age boomers would want to drive minivans. Dychtwald said he also played a role in the development of products including Michelob Ultra, multivitamin Centrum Silver and Tylenol’s arthritis product, and he helped former President Jimmy Carter write a book.

Financial advisory firm Edward Jones hired Dychtwald in 2019. Working with pollsters, he surveyed thousands of people about retirement, finding that boomers increasingly saw retirement not as a time for rest but as a time for reinvention and exploration. Dychtwald and Edward Jones dubbed their priorities — health, family, purpose and finances — the four “life pillars.” The investment company trademarked the term, and its advisers now use the concept to guide conversations with their clients.

“It put words to something that they never had words for before,” said Ken Cella, head of external affairs at Edward Jones. Dychtwald has done six more surveys for the company.

Dychtwald grew up in a middle-class family in Newark, N.J., where his father owned area clothing stores. He left college, where he was studying to be an engineer, to move to California, spent years regularly visiting the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, where nudity was common, earned a Ph.D. in psychology, fashioned his dissertation on the mind-body connection as a book, and eventually started his own company, Age Wave, to help companies understand the older demographic. He started working with elderly people in his 20s, helping run a program using yoga and meditation to improve their health, and he learned about his subject by talking to older people and working with mentors including elderly-rights activist Maggie Kuhn. He once hired a professor to teach him about what it was like to be old throughout history.

In the 1990s, television network CBS was struggling to land advertisers because its viewers skewed older. CBS hired Dychtwald, who arranged meetings to persuade prospective advertisers those viewers were worth targeting. Those meetings yielded $600 million in new ad spending the following year, said Joe Abruzzese, who ran ad sales at CBS at the time. “He’s probably the best speaker I’ve ever seen,” Abruzzese said.

Dychtwald later built companies with products catering to older people, such as local magazines and a health-products superstore, which he said gave him a net worth of more than $25 million. Those businesses unraveled right before the dot-com bubble burst, leaving him broke and contemplating suicide. He eventually rebuilt; his firm now has five employees, including his wife of 43 years, Maddy Dychtwald, who is also a speaker on aging.

These days Dychtwald spends much of his time on interviews and speeches, where his going rate is $60,000. Two years ago he addressed the Business Council, made up of CEOs of the largest U.S. companies, and he does about half of his 15 or so keynote speeches a year free to nonprofits.

Despite his decades in California, he retains an East Coast intensity. When audience members tell him they enjoyed his talk, he counters: “What about it was great?”

Talking about seniors is different now that Dychtwald is one himself. “I profoundly underestimated how painful it is to lose a loved one or how frightening it is to have your body start to fail,” he said in an interview. Both of his parents lived into their 90s but with long declines — his mother had Alzheimer’s disease and his father went blind from macular degeneration — and Dychtwald estimates he spent around $1 million on home healthcare for them. Two of his friends died in recent months.

Dychtwald eats an anti-inflammatory diet, exercises twice a day, takes about a dozen different vitamins and gets regular massages. He has no plans to ever stop working.

Dychtwald thinks companies are doing a much better job catering to older Americans. High-end cruise lines offer ambitious itineraries to curious older travelers, Home Depot hires elderly people for part-time jobs, and Mercedes-Benz sells models that make it easier to get in and out but doesn’t pitch them explicitly to seniors. “They know their audience is older, but they don’t hammer on it,” he said. Those companies are not currently his clients.

Decades ago, Dychtwald predicted America would turn into a “gerontocracy,” where economic and political power shifted from the young to the old. He thinks politicians will start saying that boomers have too many resources. “We’ve made it really hard to be young,” he said.

At the October conference, Dychtwald asked people to raise a hand if they would like to live to 100, and about half did. He called on audience members; “It’s more about healthspan than lifespan,” one said, referencing the idea that healthy years are what’s most important. “Oh, there’s great words,” Dychtwald replied. He put up a slide with demographic data showing the population of Americans 65 and over set to skyrocket while all other age groups grow slowly or even decrease. “Holy moly are you in the right places right now,” he told the attendees about their line of work. “This has never happened before.”

That compliment came with a grain of salt. Dychtwald suggested the industry might consider changing its name altogether, showing a picture of Tom Cruise starring in the “Top Gun” sequel as an example of the new ideal. “I’ve looked at every study in the last 10 years. Boomers don’t ever want to be a ‘senior,’” he said. “I know that this is ‘senior housing’ and that worked. It may not work going forward.”