When husband-and-wife team Paul Hedquist and Margy Altmix began thinking about places to retire and what to do in retirement, their personal mission morphed into a business plan.
The couple, who are in their late 50s, ended up moving from Des Moines, Iowa, to Loveland and last month launched a new website, My Plan After 50 (www.myplanafter50.com). The site serves as a portal to information on topics such as financial planning, employment and health.
The site makes an attempt to serve a demographic traditionally underserved online, baby boomers. Most new websites focus on the 18- to 34-year- old set. Baby boomers, however, make up the fastest-growing segment of people getting online and spend about $7 billion online annually, according to Immersion Active, a Washington, D.C.-based Internet marketing agency focused on boomers.
“We see multiple, emerging needs for a vast number of individuals entering that phase of life beyond raising children and rising in a career,” said Hedquist, also chief executive of Employee & Family Resources Inc., a Des Moines nonprofit firm that provides executive coaching and employee-assistance services to companies.
My Plan After 50 is just one of several sites emerging that realize boomers are tech-savvy, affluent and not just looking for information but ways to connect with others and share a lifetime of experience and valuable information.
founder Jeff Taylor last year launched, a site dedicated to people older than 50 living “the biggest life possible.” The site contains articles, interviews, how-to lists, books, links to other websites, and a space where members can swap tips, share insights and make friends.
There’s also TeeBeeDee (www.tbd.com), a social networking site for boomers started last year by Robin Wolaner, who also founded Parenting magazine.
500 registered users
My Plan After 50 has about 500 registered users and has a social networking aspect to the site, where registered users can post to forums or send messages to others with similar interests.
The site doesn’t contain ads but makes money from its tiered registration structure for membership, with prices ranging from $59 to $720 a year based on the number of hours of personal coaching by a member.
The social networking aspect of the site differs greatly from MySpace and other sites popular with a younger set because it is relatively anonymous and solely based on a preset list of interests. Altmix and Hedquist said they plan to grow the social networking aspect of the site over time.
The current setup of the site doesn’t excite users in a society obsessed with making online friends who are leaders in a given area, said Jeff Rutenbeck, dean of the Communication and Creative Media division at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt.
“A social network of any kind is only valuable if other people are in there. … Am I going to be joining a hot baby-boomer community?” he said. “I think that’s what they’re missing.”
“Means of dialoguing”
Altmix, president of My Plan After 50 and director of coaching for Employee & Family Resources, said interviews with potential users of the site revealed that the stronger their social network, the better chance they had for fulfillment in retirement.
“The social network is a means of dialoguing and learning from one another,” she said.
Rutenbeck said it’s probably good to try to connect with baby boomers online.
“For boomers, we have yet to see that kind of dominant or truly successful (social networking) model emerge, so why not try?” he said. “I don’t think there’s a lot out there to appeal to boomers.”
My Plan After 50 originally began as a retirement planning site, but Hedquist and Altmix soon realized that a lot of people weren’t planning on retiring. According to a 2005 survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 76 percent of baby boomers plan to keep working and earning money in retirement.
Hedquist said that his Employee & Family Resources has invested nearly $750,000 in the site during the past three years as they prepared it for launch.
“We distinguish ourselves from our competitors with a life-planning model,” he said. “We’re not just trying to be a place where people participate in blogs or forums. It’s that life planning we want to bring to the development of online communities.”
Staff writer Kimberly S. Johnson can be reached at 303-954-1088 or kjohnson@denverpost.com.
Baby boomers and seniors spend an average of $7 billion online per year.
Source: Immersion Active
