Living longer

A friend of mine's mother is still alive at 102 years old, the problem is that she has outlived most of her income and my friend just had to move her from the Nursing home she had been in for the last 10 years, because they could not afford it any more. It is too early to say what the impact will be on the mother, but the odds are it won't be very positive.

Knowing our live expectancy is important, What many of us do not realilze is that life expectancy for those alive at age 65 has also increased dramatically. In 1950, a 65-year-old male could expect to live another 12.8 years. In 2014, a 65-year-old male could expect to live on average of 18 more years. The same is true for women. In 1950, a 65-year-old woman could expect to live another 15 years. By 2014, a 65-year-old woman could expect to live another 20.5 years.

If you knew your date of death, retirement planning would be a breeze.

Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately? — you don't. And that can make planning for retirement extremely difficult. Does your nest egg need to last 20 years? 30 years? 40 years? And what about couples? How should couples go about planning for the likelihood that one spouse — usually the husband — predeceases the other?

Well, if you’re like most people, you’re guessing at this, and guessing quite wrong.

According to studies, most of us do not understand longevity well. Since we don't understand longevity, those of us who plan, often do not plan for long enough,”

Becoming familiar with current life-expectancy statistics is the first order of business. The link above is a link to a  tool, developed by the American Academy of Actuaries and the Society of Actuaries,which is designed to provide you with perspectives on your longevity.

Following are resources, prepared by the sponsoring organizations that may be of interest for you in planning for retirement:

• Managing Retirement Decisions – 11 issue briefs written in everyday language that tackle a variety of retirement decisions with practical considerations and advice.

• Academy Lifetime Income Initiative - The goal of the initiative is to educate the public, lawmakers, regulators, financial advisors, employers and the media on the risk of inadequate lifetime income.

• Retirement for the AGES - The American Academy of Actuaries' initiative, Retirement for the AGES, is intended to focus attention on the United States retirement-income system, which needs to be strengthened to improve financial security for retired Americans. 

I used the tool and found the results interesting in that it gave me a 50% chance of living another 20 years, and a 10% chance of living another 30 years So the odds are I need to plan for at least another 20 to 25 years of living.

There are two things to understand about retirement planning, the first is how long you might live, and the second is having the income to last  throughout your life. If you outlive your money, there may be a problem for you and your loved ones.

Life might be boring if

Would it be as much fun, if you never stopped laughing?
If there were never any clouds? 
If you were never challenged? 
If you were never alone? 
If you never heard the whole truth when it hurt? 
If you always knew what would happen, what to do, and where to go?
I would find life that is like that BORING, I suspect you might as well. 

Do couples save for retirement? Surprise 1/3 don't

An online survey conducted by Arielle O’Shea at NerdWallet, a personal finance website, found that many twosomes don’t take advantage of the benefits. 

A Harris Poll recently surveyed more than 1,800 Americans in a relationship — defined as married or living with a partner — for NerdWallet, and a third of respondents said neither they nor their partner is saving for retirement, according to the survey. Here are three of the most worrisome missteps:

When couples save, they often are doing it in the wrong accounts

Here’s the general order when it comes to where you should save for retirement: Contribute to your 401(k) or other employer-sponsored plan, at least to the point where you earn all possible matching contributions. Then turn to a traditional or Roth individual retirement account. If you max that out, you can add more money to the 401(k).

Unfortunately, many Americans in a relationship who are saving for retirement have somehow worked into that hierarchy a savings account, which showed up in the NerdWallet survey as the second most common home for retirement savings.

2. Couples are letting one partner shoulder the retirement responsibility

It’s not unusual to have an income gap in a relationship; the wage gap actually widens with marriage and expands more when children come into play. According to salary comparison site Payscale, married women without children make 21% less than married men without children. That gap widens to 31% when you compare married women with children to their male counterparts.

So it’s not surprising that in the NerdWallet survey, only 24% of Americans in a relationship said both they and their partner are saving for retirement, or that men in a relationship were more likely to report saving for retirement than women in a relationship (65% versus 46%).

Saving for retirement is a solo game until you’re married. After that, it should be a shared effort. That’s not because the non-saver could be left with nothing in a divorce — how retirement assets are split depends on your state, but they do get split — but because that person could be giving up tax advantages and employer-matching dollars.

Even if one spouse earns less, the couple should be planning retirement account choices together. If only one of you has access to an employer match, use your shared retirement savings to contribute enough to catch that match, which is free money and a guaranteed return on your investment. If you both have an employer match, you should each contribute enough to take advantage of it.

Couples are not putting a dollar sign on their dreams

It isn’t hard to talk about the fun parts of retirement, like how and where you’re going to spend it. I’m not saying these chats aren’t important — my husband should know that I’m out if he ever buys an RV — but how you’re going to pay for those dreams should also be part of the conversation.

The trouble is that, according to the NerdWallet report, almost a third of Americans in a relationship who are saving for retirement haven’t discussed how much they need to save. This isn’t a fun part, but it also isn’t hard: An effective retirement calculator can shoulder some of the work.

How much you save makes all the difference in retirement. It means you can live in a beach house instead of a sandcastle. It’s what gives you a choice about how you’ll spend retirement; without savings, you could spend it working, and that’s if you’re lucky. Nearly half of retirees left work earlier than planned, most commonly due to health issues, according to a recent survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

When you plan for your future, you can hope for the best while being prepared for the worst.

Research on Ageing

Some loss of memory is often considered an inevitable part of aging, but new research reveals how some people appear to escape that fate. A study by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators examines a remarkable group of older adults whose memory performance is equivalent to that of younger individuals and finds that certain key areas of their brains resemble those of young people. 

The study published in The Journal of Neuroscience is the first step in a research program aimed at understanding how some older adults retain youthful thinking abilities and the brain circuits that support those abilities. The program is led by Bradford Dickerson, MD, director of the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit in the MGH Department of Neurology and Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, MGH Department of Psychiatry, who are co-senior authors of the new study.

While most older adults experience a gradual decline in memory ability, some researchers have described older adults – sometimes called “super agers” – with unusually resilient memories. For the current study, the MGH team enrolled 40 adults ages 60 to 80 – 17 of whom performed as well as adults four to five decades younger on memory tests, and 23 with normal results for their age group – and 41 young adults ages 18 to 35.

"Previous research on super aging has compared people over age 85 to those who are middle aged. Our study is exciting because we focused on people around or just after typical retirement age - mostly in their 60s and 70s - and investigated those who could remember as well as people in their 20s."

Imaging studies revealed that these super agers had brains with youthful characteristics. While the cortex - the outermost sheet of brain cells that is critical for many thinking abilities - and other parts of the brain typically shrink with aging, in the brains of super-agers a number of those regions were comparable in size to those of young adults.

Critically, the researchers showed not only that super-agers had no shrinkage in these brain networks but also that the size of these regions was correlated with memory ability. One of the strongest correlations between brain size and memory was found in an area at the intersection of the salience and default mode networks. Previous research has shown that this region - the para-midcingulate cortex - is an important hub that allows different brain networks to communicate efficiently.

Understanding which factors protect against memory decline could lead to important advances in preventing and treating age-related memory loss and possibly even various forms of dementia.  We need to understand how some older adults are able to function very well into their seventh, eight, and ninth decades. This could provide important clues about how to prevent the decline in memory and thinking that accompanies ageing in most of us.

This blog was written from information received from David A. Kekich and the Maximum, Life Foundation www.MaxLife.org