Retirement planning now runs from birth to late-life care

Retirement planning is starting to look like a cradle-to-caregiving business. Two reports covered by PLANADVISER push the timeline in opposite directions: Guardian Life's "Next-Gen Wealth: New Opportunities for Families and Business Owners" hands wealth-building a starting line at birth, while Bquest's "Retirement Planning is Broken" argues the industry's blind spot comes at the end of a long life.

Guardian's arithmetic is specific. A family that puts the $5,000 maximum into a Trump Account — the federal children's savings account that launched in July — every year from a child's birth, then adds $7,500 annually to a traditional IRA through age 65, ends with roughly $4.1 million, assuming a 7% net return. The report is careful to call Trump Accounts a complement to existing retirement savings, not a replacement, and suggests advisers bring them into estate and tax planning alongside 529 plans, trusts and custodial accounts. Its argument is that time, not contribution size, is the investor's most valuable asset — a shift from milestone-based planning toward earlier accumulation.

Bquest, an end-of-life planning platform for advisers, takes the other end. Its white paper argues that avoiding portfolio depletion leaves clients underprepared for longevity, healthcare and caregiving. The familiar accumulation and decumulation math, the paper says, misses what happens after the last paycheck.

Neither report asks the industry to junk its calculators. Guardian simply moves the starting line to age zero; Bquest moves the finish line past the last paycheck. The planning problem, in both tellings, is the timeline. For an adviser, that means a childhood savings account and a late-life care plan now belong in the same conversation.