There are many special things about this year, but here's one I bet you haven't thought about: In 2009, the youngest baby boomers, those born in 1964, will turn 45. That's right—the entire Pepsi Generation, the youthquake, the sex-drugs-and-rock 'n' rollers, is well into middle age. That puts 65, the magic number for retirement, just two years away for the oldest baby boomers and 20 for the youngest.

When demographers started watching the baby boom, they called it "the pig in the python" because of the bulge it made in every population graph. The birth rate zoomed in 1946, peaked in 1957, and eased into a "birth dearth" after 1964. But here's the interesting thing: After 1964, owing in part to increased immigration, the number of young Americans never really dropped all that much. So while the boomer population dwarfed its predecessors, it is followed by more armies of youth.

I learned this by working with noted graphic designer Tommy McCall, who is now creating an original infographic for Financial Planning every month. McCall—whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Fortune, MIT Technology Review and Inc.—sliced up the U.S. population by age and added data on how many people in each tranche were working. What you'll see is that rather than a demographic bump, the baby boom represents the first stages of a rapid population expansion. There is no "pig in the python." Instead, there's a steep upward slope followed by a new, higher population plateau.

This has given me a great deal of hope about the future of retirement, which is the theme of this issue. We have heard a lot about the coming disaster. People don't save enough and they spend too much. The systemic problems, at this point, are obvious, as Medicare staggers toward bankruptcy and Social Security heads toward spending down its trust fund. The market meltdown has finally gotten people to focus on the fact that we're hitting a financial wall.

Even so, chances are that you and your clients will be all right, as Don Korn points out in "Rethinking Retirement." Yes, the markets are down; yes, jobs are disappearing; yes, people are suffering. Yes, we're in for some tough times before the economy and the markets turn around. But there is a vast, talented, imaginative, ambitious population of American workers who are going to find multitudinous ways to create wealth. They will be working to support themselves, as well as us aging boomers, long after we've all left the office for good.

—Marion Asnes, editor in chief

Marion Asnes became the editor of Financial Planning magazine in 2005. Financial Planning is the leading professional magazine for independent financial planners and has a circulation of 115,000. The topics covered on its pages range from industry news and trends to sophisticated discussions of portfolio management, estate planning and philanthropy. Asnes is the first female editor in chief of Financial Planning in the magazine's 38-year history.

Before joining Financial Planning, Asnes was a senior editor at Money, participating in the magazine’s coverage of personal finance, retirement, investment and health care issues. Her areas of expertise included retirement and 401(k) planning, asset allocation, estate planning and the particular financial challenges faced by women. In addition to her regular editorial duties at Money, Asnes co-edited Money for Women, an annual special issue that was featured exclusively on “The Today Show” on NBC.

A 27-year service journalism veteran, Asnes has contributed to a long list of national publications including Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, More, Mirabella, Working Woman and Lear's. She has spoken at conferences and symposia ranging from the National Endowment for Financial Education’s Retirement Summit to the National Football League’s Rookie Symposium. In addition, Asnes has appeared on national television programs as an expert on financial and economic topics including CNN, CNN Headline News, NBC's Today, ABC's 20/20, PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor.

Asnes graduated with a B.A. from Cornell University.