Do you need/want more sleep?

How consistently are you sleeping 7-9 hours per night? Please remember the word here is “consistently.”  Begin a journal on how you could start to improve your sleep. A good nights sleep begins with having a healthy, active day.

Do you activate your physical body with stretching or a workout every morning? In addition, do you begin your day strategically planning or in reaction-mode responding to your emails, messages and demands of others? How much of your first 60-minutes is really spent thinking and finding your center and purpose? Write how you could improve.

“Block Time” is a focus-management approach that requires “blocking out” significant amounts of time to advance or complete a major project in your life. It requires you to get clear on a major dream and schedule real time to leap towards it. Do you tend to schedule uninterrupted blocks of time to work each day, or are you in reaction mode all day? Journal here on how you could improve:

Do you take at least one standing break per hour when working or during times, you are sitting? Do you move and stretch during that time? How could you take more breaks during each hour and what will you do to remind yourself to do it?

Do you meditate or take a walk each single day on a consistent basis? What practice could you begin to reset your mind toward peace and freedom each day and how will you remind yourself to practice every day?

Increasing our focus, energy, and effectiveness by 30% every single week is easy, make a plan, and follow it by improving your answers to the above. Start by listing your priorities ever day

PRIORITIES

The main things I must complete today, no matter what.

List the priorities and to-dos that must be accomplished today and DO these before getting trapped in your inbox and other people’s agendas. 

Retirement Planning Software

Retirement Planning Software is an important tool, but how good are the tools we see on line. The  Society of Actuaries, and the International Foundation for Retirement Education did a review of the tools we use and the information is useful but it is not exciting to read. Here is an excerpt from their report. For the full report go here (PDF FILE)

Retirement, the last phase of life, is undergoing dramatic change. These changes are affecting how long people spend in retirement, how retirement is funded, and what it means to be retired. While recent evidence suggests the median retirement age has levelled off and may have begun to increase,
the median retirement age declined by around five years during the latter half of the twentieth century. At the same time, people are living longer. This results in people spending more time in retirement than in the past. Fewer employers are now offering post-retirement benefits such as pensions and health insurance. 

With longer retirements and fewer employer-provided post-etirement benefits, individuals are by necessity becoming responsible for a growing share of their retirement funding. However, it is not simply a matter of having enough resources, but also how they are utilized. Consideration must be given to the many risks retirees face; risks that were previously less prominent or were mitigated by employer-provided programs. These risks include, but are not limited to:

• Longevity: Retirees must now ensure their assets will last as long as they do. While Social Security provides workers with income for as long as they live, employer-provided retirement benefits are increasingly being paid out in a form that does not guarantee a lifetime income.

• Inflation: While inflation has been modest in recent years, even modest inflation can have a profound effect on purchasing power when compounded over many years. Social Security and many public employee retirement systems increase benefit payments to retirees annually to reflect inflation, but private pension plans generally do not.

• Investment: With an increasing share of responsibility for retirement funding and longer investment horizons, retirees often invest a portion of their assets in equities, subjecting them to market risk. When previous generations of retirees invested in equities, it was less likely that they needed to rely on these funds as today’s retirees must. Another investment risk is interest rate risk. 

A common strategy of people who retired a decade or two ago was to invest their retirement assets very conservatively in fixed income products such as certificates of deposit or fixed rate annuities. They saw their income decrease upon renewal of these products as interest rates declined since then.

• Health: A focus is needed on both acute care and long-term care. Retirees bear the cost of health care and coverage up to Medicare eligibility and after Medicare eligibility, of Medicare supplement and/or other private health insurance, and any costs over and above what these programs cover. 

The rapidly escalating cost of health care and prescription drugs will continue
to strain retirees’ limited resources going forward. While Medicare covers a small part of long-term care, most long-term care is not covered either by employer sponsored health plans or Medicare. An extended period of long-term care needs can decimate even a fairly substantial nest egg, and providing for long-term care is a major issue for many individuals.

The very nature of retirement is also undergoing change. It is no longer standard to stop working altogether and retire. More and more people are retiring gradually, or in phases. In doing so, they are remaining actively engaged in the workforce, perhaps part time, through volunteerism, or even
new careers.

All of these factors are making it more difficult for people to plan their retirement. LIMRA, the Society of Actuaries (SoA), and the International Foundation for Retirement Education (InFRE) decided to work together to find out what computerized tools are available to help retirees with their planning. The goal of the research was to determine how prevailing programs treat the retirement phase and, more specifically, how they treat retirement risks.

This report reviews retirement planning software programs currently available to individuals and their professional advisors. Such programs can help individuals decide how much to save toward retirement, how to invest these savings, when they can afford to retire, and how to manage their
financial affairs after retirement. We selected a total of 19 programs for analysis. Six of the programs are available for consumer use, 11 are available for professionals or their firms to help in developing plans for their clients, and two are proprietary programs developed by large planning firms.

We developed six case studies to help test the programs and their capabilities. The cases represent a range of situations from pre-retirees to
retirees, married couples to individuals, financially not so well off to fairly affluent, and included a variety of special situations and issues.
This report does not rate or recommend specific programs. Rather, it explains how programs that are currently available work, and what features can be improved. This presentation should assist individuals and their advisors in choosing the kinds of programs that will be useful, and encourage software firms and financial institutions to improve the software they make available.
As a result of this research, we hope that:

• More people will plan well for retirement
• People will analyze their options and understand the tradeoffs available to them 
• Actuaries will improve the methodology available for planning, and
• Tools will be improved to better handle risks 

Conclusions

• Combined, the tools analysed have an extensive list of features and capabilities. Their value is in helping people estimate income, retirement needs, and spending.
• The programs are generally not developed to address retirement risks. Instead, the tools mainly mask risk. That is, the calculations may use average figures to represent an individual’s future life span, the expected rate of inflation, etc. Because actual experience will vary widely around the averages, in practice such calculations may suggest a plan for retirement which some individuals. Proprietary programs are developed by planning firms, usually for exclusive use by the financial planners they employ. can’t afford. For example, in selecting a time horizon for the analysis of twenty years, a program may provide a false sense of security if the results show the financial resources sufficient to provide required income over that time, when in fact their resources may not last much longer. Because of the lack of risk treatment, it is important to run multiple scenarios.
• The programs varied greatly on their inputs and how to treat various situations. For example, the handling of home equity ranged from no treatment to programs that automatically withdrew income from the home each year. It was difficult to accurately portray each case study in any program or to do so consistently across programs.
• Because of the variety in the programs’ inputs, capabilities, and results, direct comparisons of a wide range of results was impossible. However, there is tremendous variability across programs regarding when the assets ran out, if at all.
• With results that vary across programs, it is recommended that, where possible, consumers or financial professionals working with them run multiple programs and use multiple scenarios within each program.
• These programs are merely tools to help facilitate the retirement planning process and there is no right answer. Nor is there any general agreement on the right answer or how to arrive at it. The results from any program should not be used as the sole input for decision making for retirees or prospective retirees. It is very likely that professionals using these programs consider many of the issues raised in this report and may also do so out of recognition of the limitations of the program(s) they have chosen to use

Canada Pension Plans do well. 19 ranked in the top 300

Reports on the pensions industry can be dull and they are usually overlooked. One such study published last week attracted few headlines yet offered wonderful insights.

The world’s 300 largest pension schemes, a study put together by Towers Watson, allowed interesting conclusions to be drawn on who owns the world’s retirement wealth – and what that says about how each country will meet future pension costs.

Canada’s Pension plans do well, we have 19 in the top 300 plans. Canadians who are in the following plans should be happy that their pensions are doing well compared to the rest of the world. 

There is debate on what to do with the Canada Pension Plan, I think, as the Canada Pension Plan is the 8^th ranked plan in the world, we should be expanding this plan.

The Canada Pension Plan is described by Towers Watson as one of a number of Sovereign Pension Plan. Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) are pools of assets owned and managed directly or indirectly by governments to achieve national objectives. 

They may be funded by: i) foreign exchange reserves; ii) the sale of scarce resources such as oil; or iii) from general tax and other revenue. There are a number of potential objectives of SWFs, which are not always easy to attribute to a particular fund; and some funds may have more than one of the distinguishable objectives. Some of these are: i) to diversify assets; ii) to get a better return on reserves; iii) to provide for pensions in the future; iv) to provide for future generations when natural resources run out; v) price stabilisation schemes; vi) to promote industrialisation; and vii) to promote strategic and political objectives.

These funds have raised concerns These funds have raised concerns about: i) financial stability, ii) corporate governance and iii) political interference and protectionism.

Public Pension Reserve Funds (PPRFs) have a more specific objective At the same time governments have formed other large pools of capital, in particular to finance public pensions, which are generally referred to as Public Pension Reserve Funds (PPRFs). There are two such types of funds: those set up and owned directly by government (Sovereign Pension Reserve Funds, or SPRFs) and those belonging to the social security system (Social Security Reserve Funds, or SSRFs). SPRFs may be considered a type of SWF with an exclusive mandate to finance future public pension expenditures. On the other hand, not all SSRFs may be considered SWFs. Some are legally independent of government and their balances are not integrated for national accounting purposes into the government accounts.

The Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute (SWFI) is a global organization designed to study sovereign wealth funds, public pensions, superannuation funds, central banks and other long-term public investors in the areas of investing, asset allocation, risk, governance, economics, policy, trade and other relevant issues

Pension plans ranks are below:

Rank Pension Name              Country      Assets (in Millions)

Playgrounds for Seniors, an idea whose time has come

I read about this concept and thought what an interesting idea. We all love to play and having our own playground makes a great deal of sense to me. Again this shows me that Boomers are redefining ageing.

Although they're already constructed on four continents, so-called "playgrounds for seniors" are making news as a potential worldwide trend.

A strange-but-true story can be hard to resist, and one such story emanating from England last spring proved irresistible to many news organizations, bloggers and readers. It involved the opening of London's first outdoor playground for senior citizens, located in the city's popular Hyde Park, and the story went viral although its subject was neither completely accurate - it is more fitness park than playground - nor all that strange. England had already opened its first playground for seniors (in Manchester in 2008), an event that hardly penetrated the world's collective consciousness. 

Hyde Park Senior Playground eventually made 500 newspapers, but as the references to "swinging London" multiplied in print and online (despite no swings installed), it was easy to miss the wider story. Over the past six years, senior playgrounds have been constructed on at least four continents and are becoming more abundant - even in the United States, where they may well be about to bust out of the confines of senior living facilities.

Closer to home, the province of British Columbia has spent $2 million on outdoor playgrounds for older adults, Milner says. But these facilities are "way more prevalent in the United States than anywhere else," he adds, even if senior playgrounds in the U.S. have been funded and developed almost exclusively by retirement communities, with those under the purview of municipal agencies located at senior centres rather than in public parks.

Wellness playgrounds for elders take the concept of a traditional indoor exercise room and move it outdoors. Wellness playgrounds for elders include:

• Swings and see-saws.
• Walking paths, with ramps, steps, arches, and reflexology sections.
• Multi-person, face-to-face exercise equipment focused on balance, muscle tone cardiovascular activity, fine motor skills, and range of motion.
• Game tables for cards, board games, ping-pong, and jacks.
• Basketball hoops, bocce, horseshoes, or other tossing games.
• Touch-screen computers with games for brain exercise and dexterity.
• Conversational nooks and peaceful seating.
• Attractive small and large shelters.
• Raised and in-ground gardens.
• Water features.
• Acoustic spaces for playing and listening to music and readings.
• Murals and sculptures.
• Thoughtful use of colour.

Must Have Play's playgrounds for elders encourage social interaction by providing:

• Safe, attractive and peaceful gardens, with shelters, conversational seating nooks, and wide walking paths.
• Activity equipment designed for face-to-face usage.
• Games like chess, cards, bocce, and ping-pong.
• Spaces for yoga or tai chi.
• Acoustic performance spaces for both observing and performing.

Regular exercise for elders may help to:

• Prevent falls and fractures.
• Reduce the risk of strokes, heart disease, and some cancers.
• Lessen cognitive decline.
• Control obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure.

Must Have Play provides consultations for designing and building wellness playgroundsfor retirement communities, assisted living and other senior communities. The organization provides 3D digital models of the design, cost estimates, builders, contractors, and consultants such as parks departments, town planners etc.

Wellness playgrounds for elders are also known in other parts of the world as Nursing Care Prevention Parks, Senior Citizens' Playgrounds, or Older People's Play Areas. Wellness playground for elders can be found in China, Japan, Finland, Germany, Canada, England and the United States.

source: musthaveplay.com

Default Plans for retirement Voluntary or Mandatory

A study done in 2011  by Dean Baker and David Rosnick called A Voluntary Default Savings Plan: An Effective Supplement to Social Security  looks at the need for a new retirement program in the US. Here is their Executive Summary for the full report go here (PDF File)

This paper outlines a proposal for a default savings plan that is intended to provide an important supplement to retirement income for the bottom half of the workforce, most of whom have little other than Social Security to support themselves in retirement at present. Under the proposal, workers would make a default contribution of 3.0 percent on annual wages up to $40,000. They could opt out from this contribution if they choose. The contribution would be automatically turned into an annuity at retirement although workers would have the option to make a lump sum withdrawal after paying a modest penalty.

The lowest income workers would get a modest contribution paid into the system by the government based on their earnings. This payment would be modeled along the lines of the Earned Income Tax Credit, with the payment increasing with earnings up to $8,000 and then phasing down to zero with earnings above $20,000. There would also be a match of savings that phases down to zero at $40,000.

Based on assumptions derived from research on participation in default savings plans, the Tax Policy Center of the Brooking Institution and the Urban Institute calculated the projected average contribution rate by income and household type. The exercise showed that the plan would lead to a substantial increase in retirement savings for workers in the bottom three quintiles. This increment to savings would increase retirement income for workers in the bottom two quintiles by at least 15-20 percent from current levels, with the increase for the third quintile being somewhat more than 10
percent.

The paper notes that this plan would not achieve universal coverage and compares its merits with a mandatory proposal. The discussion notes that a mandatory plan would also not be able to achieve universal coverage, given that there would be some level of evasion, as is currently the case with Social Security. If there is substantial non-participation in a voluntary default program – meaning workers really do not want to save for retirement – then it suggests that workers view forced saving as equivalent to a tax. In this case, a mandate is likely to lead to increased non-compliance with existing tax law, including increased evasion of Social Security contributions.

A second implication is that a mandate would have negative labor market effects, with workers viewing the mandate as leading to a lower after-tax wage. This would lead to somewhat lower rates of employment. In the extreme case, where a worker viewed the entire mandated contribution as a
tax, a mandated 3.0 percent contribution would reduce employment by more than 200,000, with most of the falloff coming at the bottom end of the earnings distribution.

The paper also notes that it may be more politically feasible to institute a voluntary default system than a mandatory retirement system. If this is the case, then there might be a strong argument for moving ahead with a voluntary system even if a mandatory system could in principle be more desirable. There are tens of millions of workers who are approaching retirement with little more than their Social Security to support them. 

Each year that the adoption of a new system is delayed ensures that more workers will be inadequately prepared for retirement. This fact would seem to be a strong argument for moving ahead with the system that is most politically feasible, recognizing that any system can always be extended and improved, if there is public support for it.