“Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” ― William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets

The last Monday in August. The last Monday of Summer. To ease the pain, we’ve collected the week’s top tips/resources for marketing to baby boomers and seniors.

1. MOST CLICKED: The great comedian Phyllis Diller died last week at 95. This video of Diller “auditioning” for the Spice Girls had people clicking and laughing. Why did she want to be a Spice Girl? “Because I hear spice is used as a preservative. At least that’s what the Egyptians used when they mummified me.” RIP, funny lady.

See the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGD7TNnDeSQ

2. MOST SHARED: What is making 60+ and 70+ Americans so optimistic? Resilience, financial security, writes Paula Span in the New York Times’ terrific blog, “The New Old Age.” Span writes she read the recent United States of Aging report and wondered what was making the respondents over 70 so “insistently optimistic.”

When I called a couple of my favorite gerontologists to help me puzzle this out, they weren’t really surprised; social scientists have known for years that older people, freed from the midlife stresses of work and child rearing, become happier. They call it the U-shaped curve: life satisfaction is greatest in people’s youth and then again in old age.

“You’re seeing resilience,” said David J. Ekerdt, a University of Kansas gerontologist. “You’re seeing the way we adjust our frames of reference to continue to assert, ‘I’m the kind of person who’ll be O.K.’” …

It’s also true that those over 70 are more likely than the boomers behind them to have retired with pensions, intact marriages and paid-off mortgages. Less financially battered by the recession, they may indeed be more secure financially, thus less worried.

Span also notes there might have been confusion with the way questions were worded on the survey tool. Read her full post: http://nyti.ms/PINvoe

3. MOST FAVORITED: (Did you know that people can “favorite” a tweet? It’s the Twitter version of a “like.”) Our active adult communities client Traditions of America was featured in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece — “For Retirees, Pittsburgh Has A Lot to Love.”

Read the article: ow.ly/da9OV

Also of note:

* Australian baby boomers are haunted by debt, finds RaboDirect. “Baby boomers are feeling the pinch and are the most pessimistic of all the generations about the economic outlook of the nation,” said spokeswoman Renee Amor. One-third will have a mortgage when they retire. Half report having less money to live on each week.

Herald-Sun article: http://bit.ly/SI508N

Link to full report from RaboDirect Australia: http://bit.ly/RnUi7q

* The annual Beloit Mindset list is out! This intriguing list looks at what this year’s incoming freshman think or have experienced.

For example, the class of 2016 has never known Romper Room, printed encyclopedias or a man as the head of the US State Department. They also have been wired throughout their lives. As Beloit College puts it:

“This year’s entering college class of 2016 was born into cyberspace and they have therefore measured their output in the fundamental particles of life: bits, bytes, and bauds …  In these students’ lifetimes, with MP3 players and iPods, they seldom listen to the car radio. A quarter of the entering students already have suffered some hearing loss.”

Get the Mindset List: http://bit.ly/NRgjfs

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the differences between our favorite 50+ consumers and today’s freshmen. Does the list make you feel youth, too, has too short a date?