A healthy life style is important as we age

Leading a healthy lifestyle not only extends one's lifespan, but it also shortens the time that is spent disabled - a finding that had previously eluded public health scientists and demonstrates the value of investing in healthy lifestyle promotion, even among the elderly.

In an earlier post, I referred to a study called Healthy Life Expectancy (pdf file) that shows that living longer does not guarantee people will be fit enough to work into old age.

I talked about the stats that show many of us, while living longer, spend many of those years in poor health. New research shows that we can change this pattern. An analysis of a quarter century of data by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and their colleagues nationwide revealed that older adults with the healthiest lifestyles could expect to spend about 1.7 fewer years disabled at the end of their lives, compared to their unhealthiest counterparts. The study results are online and scheduled for the October issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

If we spend less time in poor health, this will have enormous personal and societal implications, ranging from quality of life to health care costs. By staying healthy, by exercising and by eating properly so our overall heath improves thus improving our lifestyle we may postpone both our own death and disability, but it may mean less time in poor health at the end of our life.

The researchers examined data collected by the Cardiovascular Health Study, which followed 5,888 adults from Sacramento County, Calif.; Forsyth County, N.C.; Washington County, Md.; and Allegheny County, Pa., for 25 years. All of the participants were aged 65 or older and were not institutionalized or wheelchair-dependent when they enrolled.

The participants reported or were assessed for various lifestyle factors, including smoking habits, alcohol consumption, physical activity, diet, weight and their social support system. The researchers took into account and adjusted results for such factors as participants' age, sex, race, education, income, marital status and chronic health conditions.

Across all the participants, the average number of disabled years directly preceding death - years when the person had difficulty eating, bathing, toileting, dressing, getting out of bed or a chair, or walking around the home - averaged 4.5 years for women and 2.9 years for men, which is inline with the world wide data.

For each gender and race group, those with the healthiest lifestyle (those who were non-smokers of a healthy weight and diet and getting regular exercise) not only lived longer, but had fewer disabled years at the end of their lives. For example, a white man in the healthiest lifestyle group could expect to live 4.8 years longer than his counterpart in the unhealthiest group, and at the end of his life, he'd likely spend only two of those years disabled, compared to 3.7 years for his unhealthy counterpart.

Put another way, that man's healthy lifestyle has given him nearly three more years of active life free of disability than his unhealthy counterpart, who not only died earlier but spent the last three-and-a-half years of his life disabled - a larger percentage of those remaining years.

So the bottom line for me is to invest and take the time to maintain a healthy lifestyle and encourage my friends and other people to maintain healthy behaviors into old age. The results of this survey indicate that as seniors we need to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Being healthy may allow to reduce risk of being disabled for a longer period when you are near the end of life.

We hold faith (revisited)

Changing a few words changes the meaning and direction and message we want our readers to hear. Words have power and force that go beyond the writer. A few days ago, I wrote that we hold faith and I looked at death. Yet by changing and deleting a few words in the post to look at birth, we hold faith, has a changed perspective.

For a mother or a father of a newborn life becomes a storehouse of anticipated dreams, of unanswered questions, of yet to be filled dreams and desires, of unanswered questions both welcomed and rewarding, self-love and self sacrifice.

When someone is born, their life becomes an unfinished biography, a book with a plot that hangs in the air, an ever-expanding half-finished dream. Life hides bundles of truths to be discovered, of joys yet to be felt, love turned outside in. The birth of a child, uplifts us from nothing, gives us back joyful memories that were suspended in our past. These memories can heal the soul, lift the heart, reveal the truth or justify the intentions of our imagination.

When a birth occurs, life begins to mean so much, Death seems a million miles away and unwanted. Life and living for the child become both the question and the answer, the problem and the solution. A new life becomes the beginning.

We talk about the future when a birth happens. We listen to our ministers preach convincingly about life because we know they have experienced it themselves. We seek out those who are more knowledgeable about life than us and have experienced it at first hand. We hold faith that there is a better life for the new. Some of us hold faith with religion and others who we believe will show us a better way for the new one with us. 

There is love, hope, and joy in a birth. We celebrate with the parents, the family and friends, we rejoice in the hope that the child will have a better life and will not make the same mistakes we made.  We call on our gods to show the way for the child to be a good person. 

Celebrate your life and all new life by being the best you can be.

We hold faith

For we that live, when we lose someone to death, death becomes a storehouse of discontinued dreams, of unanswered questions, of unfulfilled dreams and desires, of unanswered problems of regrets and remorse, self-hate, self-love or unjustified guilt and shame.

When someone dies, their life becomes an unfinished biography, a book with a plot that hangs in the air, an ever silenced half-finished dream. Death hides bundles of lies never admitted, of sins never confessed, of love or hate turned inside out. The death of a friend or loved one, reduces everything to nothing, leaves us with suspended memories that can heal the soul, break the heart, distort the truth or justify the intentions of the survivor's imagination.

Why does death mean so much and life mean so little? Why is death a million miles away and just around the corner? How can death be unwanted, unanticipated for some, welcomed as long lost friend, a conquering hero for others? Why is death both the question and the answer, the problem and the solution?  Death can be the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.

We do not talk of death, it is a subject like religion and politics to be avoided. Why? How can ministers preach so convincingly about death when they have never experienced it themselves? Why must they rely on the words of a long dead God whose writings fill thousands of pages and are subject to as many interpretations?

Who can be more knowledgeable about death than those who have been there and have experienced it at first hand? But those who have experienced it cannot return to share their experiences and their expertise with the living. We hold faith that there is an afterlife, and we have religion and other fakes, fraudsters, and mystics who show us the way. Yet they depend on dead spirits and ancient text, and images floating in the afterlife of the hereafter to convince us?

To ease the pain and loss of loved ones when they die, we invented gods, religions, all the gospels and all the angels including the horned, long tail devil. When we listen to those who preach of life hereafter, or of reincarnation or in other forms of life after death we suspend our critical thinking. Why do we not ask who invented heaven and hell or why it was invented?

When I die please do not cry, or be sad, walk away and celebrate my life by being the best you can be.

Do you convert retirement saving to retirement income?

There is some interesting news out of South Africa, which relates to how people make monetary decisions when they have to convert retirement saving to retirement income. In Canada those who have money in their Registered Retirement Savings Plan, must convert these to a Registered Retirement Income Fund in the year the person turns 71. Many other countries have plans when at retirement, individuals must convert their accumulated savings into income.

According to Economics the optimal strategy for retirees is to try and secure a guaranteed income for life using life annuities.

A survey conducted by Just Retirement South Africa in 2016 revealed that 86% of people surveyed, between the ages of 55 and 85, preferred a guaranteed income for life in retirement. The 2015 Sanlam Benchmark survey showed a similar result, with 87% of people surveyed wanting certainty of income for life. But the reality is much different, the Association for Savings & Investment SA (ASISA) statistics reveal that 90% of 2015 annuity sales were of living annuities, which provide no explicit long term protection.

This observation has become known across the world as ‘the annuity puzzle’. Economists describe the annuity puzzle as a problem of maximizing lifetime expected utility.

It can be explained by recognizing that in the real world people do not make decisions by taking into account all costs and benefits. Instead, people are influenced by psychological factors and what’s considered socially acceptable or popular, and their preferences depend on how information and choices are presented to them.

The World Development Report (2015), ‘Mind, Society and Behaviour’, summarises hundreds of studies and behavioural finance research into one framework. The framework rests on three principles of human decision-making: thinking socially, thinking with mental models and thinking automatically.

These factors help to explain why when faced with this decision retirees currently convert their savings into income using living annuities:

·       Thinking socially. We have become accustomed to high real returns. Hence, investing (rather than annuitising) at retirement has become popular, with much marketing in the industry focussed on providing long-term returns, and not on how individuals can convert savings into income.

·       Thinking with mental models. When Investment framing is used at retirement instead of consumption framing research in the US and the Netherlands has shown that this has a significant impact on an individual’s ultimate decision. If investment framing is popular, instead of converting those savings into income, people will want to invest those savings. There is very limited evidence of individuals being presented with a comprehensive framework (and hence mental models) with which to understand the trade-off between living and life annuities, given their circumstances.

·       Thinking automatically. The benefits and risks of the available annuity options at retirement are complex areas to navigate. In the face of such complexity, people end up thinking automatically when faced with the decision of how to convert their savings into income – based on what they have heard from others (thinking socially) and using the rules of thumb available in the industry (mental models created over the years, founded on how to invest rather than how to convert capital into income).

One of the solutions put forward in South Africa, was for retirement funds to adopt default annuity strategies. Many retirement funds, especially umbrella funds, have started adopting default annuity strategies by making arrangements available for individuals to retire within the fund. It’s been shown that introducing defaults in other areas of finance can improve the ultimate decision making by individuals. It’s anticipated that default annuity strategies would be similarly successful.

In the financial planning industry, advisers can assist to improve their clients’ decisions on how to convert savings into an income at retirement. They can do so by introducing a ‘consumption framing’ approach, whereby appropriate mental models are created to enable an individual to trade-off between the main objectives at retirement (e.g. providing for lifetime spending needs and liquidity or an inheritance). 

Based on an individual’s circumstances, including their main retirement objectives, the most optimal investment strategy at retirement can be recommended. This includes the proportions between living annuities and life annuities and the asset allocation for the living annuity component.

All these interventions capitalize on behavioural finance techniques; it is believed that by making use of these techniques, individuals’ decisions about how to convert accumulated savings into an income can be improved, ultimately leading to pensioners securing more sustainable incomes into retirement.