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Maddy Dychtwald        

Co-Founder & Senior VP of Age Wave, Author & Changing Demographics Trends Expert

Recently recognized by Forbes as one of the top fifty female futurists globally, Maddy Dychtwald has been deeply involved for more than 30 years in exploring all aspects of the age wave and how it’s transforming the marketplace, the workplace, our world, and our lives. This has led her to become an internationally acclaimed author, public speaker, Wall Street Journal blogger, and thought leader on longevity, aging, the new retirement, and the ascent of women.

A successful entrepreneur, Dychtwald co-founded Age Wave, the world’s leader in understanding and addressing the far-reaching impacts of our aging population. The Age Wave team has worked with more than half of the Fortune 500 in industries ranging from healthcare and medical technology to financial services and consumer products.

With women at the forefront of the longevity revolution, Dychtwald has deeply explored their specific longevity-related wants, needs, and challenges. She has led numerous acclaimed studies on women and money, including the landmark "Women, Money and Power" sponsored by Allianz and, most recently, "Women and Financial Wellness: Beyond the Bottom Line" for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. In addition, she has been involved in more than 25 thought leadership research studies worldwide on aging, longevity, retirement, health, family, caregiving, housing, and leisure, which have cumulatively garnered more than twelve billion media impressions.

She is the author of three books, "Cycles: How We Will Live, Work, and Buy," "Influence: How Women’s Soaring Economic Power Will Transform Our World for the Better," and the children’s/young readers’ book "Gideon’s Dream: A Tale of New Beginnings." Currently she is working on a new book, "Women’s Longevity Bonus," that combines her professional and personal passions.

As a member of The Wall Street Journal’s Expert Panel on Retirement, Dychtwald’s posts on leadership, wealth management, and financial planning have topped the most-read lists for their categories in 2017 and 2018. Currently, she serves as the national co-spokesperson for an in-depth investigation on The Four Pillars of the New Retirement: What a Difference a Year Makes sponsored by Edward Jones. Her insights and research have been featured in prominent media outlets, including Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, Newsweek, Time, Fox Business News, CNBC, and NPR.

Having watched both her mother and mother-in-law battle dementia, Dychtwald is committed to eradicating this horrific disease. She is a co-founder of the non-profit Women Against Alzheimer’s and serves as a board member of the non-profit BrightFocus Foundation, which funds cutting-edge research to cure diseases of the brain and eye.

Speech Topics


The Future of Retirement: New Timing, New Purpose, New Funding – and New Planning Help Needed

With the convergence of rising longevity, the aging of the massive Boomer generation, and widespread financial insecurity stemming from the COVID pandemic, there is a greater need than ever for trusted, holistic financial guidance. Americans want financial professionals who seek to understand what matters most to them and their families and can help them achieve their goals.

This new presentation draws on cutting-edge new research that spans five generations. Maddy will outline the most important questions in retirement planning today and explain how financial professionals can demonstrate greater empathy to safeguard a well-lived retirement by providing targeted solutions for these uncertain times.

Topics to be covered include:

  • Why has financial peace of mind become far more important than wealth?
  • What are the greatest worries in achieving a financially secure retirement?
  • How could “generational generosity” jeopardize retirement?
  • In what ways is women’s rising financial power transforming the field of retirement planning?
  • How will the demands of eldercare, sibling care, grandparenthood, singlehood, and “rehirement” impact retirement planning?
  • Leaving a legacy: managing the greatest generational hand-off in history

Ageless Aging: The Art and Science of Living Longer, Better

The quest for long life has fascinated humans since the beginning of time. In the 21st century, it has become both a pressing social issue and big business. Over the last 100 years, life expectancy has skyrocketed from age 47 to nearly 77. While this 30-year “longevity bonus” offers many wonderful opportunities, it also creates an enormous challenge: how do we increase our healthspans to better match our longer lifespans so we can enjoy the many upsides of long life?

It’s time to better understand how to maximize our “longevity bonus” and successfully prepare for our long-lived futures.

Drawing on insights from decades of Age Wave research, top futurist Maddy Dychtwald, co-founder of Age Wave, award-winning author, and widely-read Wall Street Journal blogger, takes on the topic of longevity and ageless aging. Her most recent findings and expert advice will be featured in her upcoming book, Ageless Aging: Women’s Longevity Bonus and the Art and Science of Living Longer, Better to be published by Mayo Clinic Press. This dynamic presentation combines cutting-edge science with powerful examples designed to empower individuals to take a more informed and active role in their health and well-being. Deeply researched and packed with actionable takeaways, Maddy offers a holistic recipe for what you can do now to prepare for your longer life.

Key topics include:

  • What is your “longevity bonus” and how does it impact your life?
  • How long will you live and how old will “old” be in the years ahead?
  • How do we better match our healthspans to our lifespans?
  • How will family and caregiving be impacted by longer lives with many generations alive at once?
  • What are the biggest fears of living a long life?
  • What are the financial implications of our longevity bonus?
  • What is the holistic recipe to unlock ageless aging?

Packed with actionable takeaways, Maddy’s illuminating approach to these urgent issues brings new focus to the topic that is increasingly on everyone’s mind. The audience will leave with a clearer understanding of what a longevity bonus means for them personally and what steps they can take right now to live longer, better.

Women & Money: Funding Our Longer Lives

The growing financial power of women may be the most important demographic trend impacting financial services today. Women live longer than men, with a greater need for long-term financial fortitude. We’re also seeing new generations of women—bolstered by unprecedented levels of education, workforce participation, rising political power, and escalating income and wealth—assume increasingly influential roles in their own and their family’s financial management. The financial services industry, historically catering primarily to men, must find new ways to win the hearts, minds, and wallets of this critical and growing client base.

Drawing on insights from decades of Age Wave research, including the highly acclaimed nationwide study Women & Financial Wellness and her landmark book, Influence: How Women’s Soaring Economic Power Will Change Our World for the Better, Age Wave co-founder Maddy Dychtwald combines dramatic data and powerful storytelling to address these topics:

  • The financial implications of women’s life journey in contrast to men’s
  • Why—and how—women’s longevity bonus is motivating more women to plan financially than ever before
  • How family interdependencies can impact women and their money
  • The caregiving matrix and its effect on women’s financial and emotional well-being
  • The lifetime pay gap and what steps women must take to overcome it
  • Unpacking the gender retirement savings gap and its relationship to financial confidence
  • Men’s role in the new financial equation
  • What women want: The five critical characteristics women seek in their financial professional
  • The five steps financial professionals can take to better serve women clients more effectively

Deeply researched, customized for each unique audience, and packed with actionable takeaways, Maddy’s illuminating approach to these urgent issues brings new focus to a topic that grows more relevant each day. It will leave the audience—whether they’re women wanting to take charge of their own financial security or the financial professionals who want to better serve them—with food for thought and concrete solutions.

The Rise of History’s Biggest Untapped Market ? It’s Hiding in Plain Sight!

Men and women over 50 now make up 33% of the total U.S. population and 44% of the adult population but control more than 70% of total wealth. Due to the combination of rising longevity, declining fertility, and the aging of the Baby Boom generation, this group is now bigger than the entire market of most countries. As active and curious consumers, they are responsible for 53% of all food and grocery purchasing; 55% of all travel and leisure consumption; 56% of new car and truck purchasing; 68% of OTC drugs and 77% of all Rx drug consumption; and 78% of all retirement accounts. However, people 50+ only appear in 15% of advertisements and are disproportionately portrayed as old, sick, and homogenous.

Maddy will explain how to best target this massive, misunderstood, misrepresented, and wildly untapped new market. She’ll illustrate why 20th century notions of “lifetime brand loyalty,” “retirement,” and “seniors” have become obsolete and how with impending breakthroughs in precision medicine, living to 100+ will soon become commonplace. And she’ll provide a mind-stretching preview of the products, services, marketing, and advertising that will succeed at meeting the needs and aspirations of this new “Third Age” while eliminating the ageism that has impeded shareholder value for too long

50+ Women: The Rising Power of the Consumer Force to Be Reckoned With

The growing strength and empowerment of 50+ women have been hiding in plain sight for far too long. That is about to change. Bolstered by unprecedented levels of education and workforce participation, escalating income and wealth, tech savvy and consumer know-how, and most importantly, rising longevity and vitality, 50+ women are fast becoming the consumer force to be reckoned with. Yet they often feel ignored, misunderstood, and even disrespected by brands and marketers.

Drawing on decades of proprietary Age Wave research, including the highly acclaimed study led by Age Wave co-founder Maddy Dychtwald, Women and Financial Wellness: Beyond the Bottom Line, and insights from her landmark book, Influence: How Women’s Soaring Economic Power Will Change Our World for the Better, and her upcoming book: Ageless Aging: Women’s Longevity Bonus and the Art and Science of Living Longer, Better, Maddy explains why 50+ women are a consumer force to be reckoned with for businesses of all kinds from financial services and healthcare to fashion and technology.

As a successful entrepreneur, author, researcher, Wall Street Journal blogger, wife, and mother—and a 50+ woman herself—Maddy combines dramatic data-driven insights with inspirational storytelling, illuminating this market segment’s core attitudes, motivations, and behavioral patterns, and offering the keys to unlocking its consumer spending potential.

Topics explored in this new presentation include:

  • The size, shape, and financial clout of this quickly growing market segment and how 50+ women are disrupting aging and leading the longevity revolution
  • The consumer purchasing power and passions of 50+ women, including their approach to spending, gifting, saving, and investing
  • The ageist and/or sexist messaging that turns them off—and how to avoid these communications pitfalls
  • The emotions, desires, and challenges that motivate their purchasing decisions, including their conscious consumerism
  • How technology and social media can be both a barrier and a benefit
  • How today’s different generations of women influence each other and their purchasing decisions
  • The five-step action plan you need to capture the hearts and minds of this growing market segment

Deeply researched, customized for each unique audience, and packed with actionable takeaways, Maddy’s illuminating insights can help you understand and harness the power of 50+ women. It will leave audiences with food for thought and concrete ideas for implementing and adapting to needed change.

Generations & the Future of Housing

For the first time in history, four generations of adults are active participants in the workforce and marketplace. Each has its own lifestyle, values, attitudes, and hopes and dreams concerning home, work and money, means of connecting and communicating, and marketplace preferences. This high-impact presentation will explore these as well as the key social forces that have shaped each generation--Millennials, Gen Xers, Boomers, and the Silent Generation.

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Influence: How the Rising Power of Women Will Transform Money, Men and the Marketplace

We have reached a tipping point where a critical mass of women, bolstered by unprecedented levels of education, workforce participation and escalating income are assuming more powerful roles in their familys purchasing decisions. This is particularly true in the traditionally male-dominated sectors of financial planning, real estate, automotive and technology. Yet most marketers dont fully understand how todays woman thinks, feels, cares and buys and how women and men are increasingly partnering to make large purchasing decisions. Drawing on proprietary Age Wave research as well as dramatic insights from her landmark new book, Influence: How Womens Soaring Economic Power Change Our World for the Better, Maddy Dychtwald explores how the ascent of women is transforming their relationship to their money, their mates, their families, their careers and the marketplace.

Her presentation examines: The historic scope of womens financial influence and their expanding monetary power; the five things that all men need to know about marketing to influential women; the key ways that women are transforming the workplace and leadership; and how theyre trying to use their increased clout to transform our world for the better.

(Note: This presentation can be customized for the financial services, healthcare, consumer products and retail industries.)

Optimizing Generational Diversity: Four Cohorts Rethink Work, Money, Family, Retirement and Success

For the first time in history, four generations of active adults are simultaneously participating in the workforce and marketplace. Each has its own lifestyle values, attitudes about work and money, means of connecting and communicating, role models and marketplace preferences.

This high-impact presentation will examine: What key social forces have shaped each generation and produced their distinct, core lifetime characteristics? What does each generation hope to get fromand give totheir jobs/careers? How do you manage and motivate each generation, from encore workers seeking stimulation and self-worth, to older workers looking for balance and purpose, to mid-career workers trying to reboot their enthusiasm for a longer and more demanding worklife, to young workers struggling to enter the workforce during tough economic times. How does each measure success?

This presentation can focus on how to attract and retain valuable talent and enhance productivity through the creative use of flexible work arrangements, innovative learning, mentoring and sponsoring opportunities, sabbaticals, retraining, re-careering, flex-retirement, and creative compensation and benefits programs. Alternatively, it can orient toward the most effective ways to reach out toand connect withMillennials, Gen Xers, Boomers and members of the Silent Generation.

The Cure for Our Aging Healthcare System

Whether we live long lives with vitality and purpose or sickness and suffering will depend to a great extent on our ability to reshape the skills, services and incentives of our current healthcare system. This new presentation provides a visionary glimpse into the future, outlining the critical course corrections required to create healthy aging and productive longevity.

Topics to be covered include: Why we must accelerate the scientific breakthroughs needed to prevent, delay and eliminate the horrific diseases of aging (such as Alzheimers); why training healthcare professionals to become aging-ready will both saves lives and money; how the boomers proclivity toward control, self-care and connectivity can help make disease prevention and self-care a national priority; how new technologies and emerging community-based services can enable us to shift the healthcare focus from hospitals and nursing facilities to home-based care; why establishing a humane and dignified approach to end-of-life care has reached a critical tipping point.

Re-Visioning Retirement: New Timing, New Purpose, New Planning, New Funding

Everyones retirement clock has been reset as a result of the recession. But highly acclaimed Age Wave research reveals a surprising finding: This could be a good thing, for individuals, the consumer marketplace and financial planning professionals.

This presentation will explore: Why financial peace of mind has become far more important than wealth in the new American dream. How womens rising financial power is transforming their attitudes and behavior toward money, their family dynamics and the field of retirement planning. How the adult lifestage demands of eldercare, sibling care, grandparenthood, singlehood and rehirement will dramatically impact retirement preparation and funding. Well also discuss the products, services and guidance people now seek from financial professionals to safeguard a successful retirement while avoiding the five retirement wildcards that could shatter their dreams.

How the Age Wave Will Transform the Marketplace, the Workplace and Our Lives

Increasing longevity, declining fertility and aging baby boomers are triggering an enormous age wave. This demographic tsunami has the potential to create ground-breaking marketplace and work/talent opportunitiesand equally compelling social and financial challenges.

This informative, motivating and entertaining presentation will explore: How will people use their newfound longevity bonus? Why will the cyclic lifeplan replace the traditional linear model? How will aging boomers change established paradigms of work, leisure, learning and retirementas well as lifetime brand loyalty? Whats the most effective way to market and sell to middlescent boomers wishing to enrich the quality of their lives, while forestalling aging? Why is managing a four-generation workforce the new diversity mandate?

(Note: This presentation can be shaped to focus either on the US, North American or global Age Wave.)

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