More than three-quarters of the financial services professionals polled in a recent research survey say the current economic downturn has had a significantly greater impact on their boomer generation clients than on any other generation.

More positively, 73 percent of respondents said the downturn has made their boomer clients more focused on financial planning (also more than any other generation), according to the Partnership for Retirement Education and Planning (PREP), which sponsored the research.

According to the research, boomers have neglected planning because they don't fully understand the value (a barrier cited by 78 percent of respondents) and they are embarrassed that they haven't accumulated more assets (mentioned by 70 percent of respondents) and thus ignore the problem. Nearly half of financial advisers said at that least 75 percent of the impetus for a successful financial plan comes from them rather than the client.

"The current economic downturn has hit at a bad time for people who are in their late 50s or early 60s and haven't prepared for the future," says Philip E. Harriman, past president of the Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT), a nonprofit association of more than 39,000 financial service professionals. "With a simultaneous strain on employment, home values, and investments, these boomers are being hit harder now than generations older or younger. If there is a silver lining in this dark cloud, perhaps this is a wake-up call for boomers to get busy managing their financial well-being."

The research, conducted in January, was unveiled at a series of Boomertirement Road Shows hosted by PREP to provide tools and encouragement for professionals assisting boomers. PREP is a coalition of 11 nonprofit organizations representing more than 200,000 financial advisers.

Matt Thornhill, founder and president of The Boomer Project, the consultancy that completed the PREP research, says there has been a great deal of study of consumers and their financial situation, but relatively little of how the financial services profession is responding to the problem.

"One interesting aspect of the research is that advisers who consider themselves experts at financial and retirement planning and take a comprehensive look at their clients' financial, family, and life goals, appear to better serve their clients and to be more successful in their own business than those who don't focus on either types of planning," Thornhill says.

He says advisers in the PREP research who identified themselves as "planning experts" reported their typical client had twice the total assets as advisers who were more focused on individual product sales. The self-reported "planning experts" were not significantly different than "non-planners" in years of experience, size of firm, job function, or type of products they offer. But, "planning experts" who approach client relationships with a longer-term planning focus had three times the assets under management and reported 40 percent higher annual revenue than the "non-planners."