Maddy Dychtwald

About

About Maddy Dychtwald - Award-Winning Author & Co-Founder of Age Wave:

Recently recognized by Forbes as one of the top fifty female futurists globally, Maddy Dychtwald has been deeply involved in exploring all aspects of the age wave and how it’s transforming the marketplace, the workplace, our world, and our lives for more than 30 years. Along the way, she has 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, Maddy 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, Maddy 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 (voted Book of the Year by the National Community Colleges Association), 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, Maddy’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, Maddy 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.

A working mom for much of her adult life, Maddy is now an empty nester. She is passionate about her family as well as about longevity as both a demographic phenomenon and her personal journey. She and her husband Ken were recently awarded the prestigious Esalen Prize for their outstanding contributions to advancing the human potential of aging men and women worldwide.

Topics

What Maddy Dychtwald Talks About:

Women & Financial Wellness: Beyond the Bottom Line
The growing financial power of women may be the most important demographic trend impacting financial services today. New generations of empowered women—bolstered by unprecedented levels of education, workforce participation, rising geopolitical power, and escalating income and wealth—are assuming 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 data and powerful storytelling to address these topics:

How greater longevity can catalyze women of all ages to plan for their longer lives
How a woman’s life journey is still fundamentally different than a man’s with vast financial implications
How family interdependencies impact women and their approach to money
Unpacking the gender retirement gap
Defining the lifetime pay gap and wealth gap: what they are, how they’re different, and the steps women can take right now to make up for them
The important role men can play in this new financial equation
The 5 critical characteristics women look for in their financial professional and the 5 steps financial professionals can take to more effectively meet women’s wants, needs, and goals

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, leaving audiences—whether they be 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 ideas for implementing and adapting to change.

The New 50+ Woman: A Consumer Force to Be Reckoned With
50+ women as a consumer force have been hiding in plain sight, but that is about to change. Bolstered by unprecedented levels of education and workforce participation, escalating income and wealth, and rising longevity and vitality, they are fast becoming the most powerful and influential segment of the consumer marketplace. Yet they often feel ignored or misunderstood by brands and marketers and don’t want to be defined through a youth-focused gender lens or by their age alone.

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, 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 home furnishings.

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.

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.

Ageless Aging: How Longevity is Transforming Health, Wellness, and Aging Itself
The question of how to live longer has fascinated us since the beginning of time. In the past century, we’ve seen skyrocketing life expectancy that has turned long life into a reality—radically transforming the demographic landscape and altering our concepts of aging and longevity as well as health and lifelong wellness.

The converging forces of lengthening lifespans, global population aging, and the massive Baby Boomer generation facing their later years head-on are reshaping our world and creating a more ageless aging. It’s time to better understand what this is: both the opportunities and challenges that longevity can and will bring. It’s also time to figure out how to maximize our own “longevity bonus” years and prepare for the large-scale business, social, and lifestyle implications of this unprecedented longevity revolution.