Monthly Archives: June 2015

The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer

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BlueZones.com

The front-cover blurb on this 2008 NYT bestseller by Dan Buettner is “A must-read if you want to stay young!” Based on that, you’d wonder why every person on the planet hasn’t bought or read The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer, since who doesn’t want to stay young?

The next best thing is to live to a ripe old age and in vibrant health right up until the end. Buettner travelled five “Blue Zones” around the world to study locations that have statistical proof of the extended longevity of many of its residents. They include Sardinia (Italy), Okinawa (Japan), Loma Linda (California), Nikoya (Costa Rica) and Ikaria (Greece.)

In the United States, there is only one centenarian (someone 100 years old or more) per 5,000 people. In the Sardinian “Blue Zone” they found seven centenarians in a single village of 2,500 people.

Fortunately, these Blue Zones often share common lifestyles that North Americans can emulate.  Buettner — who originally visited the Blue Zones courtesy of National Geographic magazine — concludes with a chapter he titles Your Personal Blue Zone, providing nine major ways affluent and stressed out North Americans can emulate the lessons learned by the centenarians in the Blue Zones.

Create a pro-longevity environment in your own home: your personal Blue Zone

Continue Reading…

Today’s retirement reality

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Marie Engen, Boomer & Echo

By Marie Engen, Boomer & Echo

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

We all like to compare ourselves with our peers to see how we measure up to everyone else.

Here are some retirement statistics from the most recent Canadian Census, Statistics Canada and various surveys.

Age statistics

  • In Canada in 2014 the average age was 58.
  • The baby boom demographic, representing those born between 1946 and 1966, represents 30% of the population.
  • Within 10 years, those age 55 and over will outnumber children.
  • One in seven Canadians are now elderly and two thirds of the very elderly are women.
  • Average life expectancy is 82.5 years for women and 77.7 years for men.

Retirement statistics

  • 7% of Canadians aged 55 and over had already retired once. Of this group, 17% returned to work.
  • 48% returned to some form of work for financial reasons. The others had new, interesting job offers.
  • 23% retired initially due to personal and family responsibilities or care giving.
  • 8% retired initially due to personal health concerns.
  • 6% retired because they qualified for full pension benefits.

Continue Reading…

Longevity and Your Money

A married couple planning their retirement life

Here’s my latest blog for MoneySense, titled Longevity & Your Money. Naturally, we’ll house this here in the Hub’s Longevity & Aging section.

I’ve been researching this topic since last summer, when I met Mark Venning and his blog on longevity at ChangeRangers.com. He has since contributed some blogs to the Hub.

All this has culminated in a keynote address I’ll be giving next Monday in Niagara Falls, for the National Elder Planning Issues Conference in Niagara Falls, entitled Longevity Changes Everything.

Researching the topic was a bit daunting: I counted more than 5,500 titles at Amazon.com containing the word Longevity. We’ve reviewed some of them in the past in the Reviews section of the Hub and will run more in the coming weeks, usually on Fridays.

The bottom-line conclusion I make in the blog, and which MoneySense focused on in the dek (the line below the headline) is that you might want to add ten years in your mind as to how long you live. So if you’ve been mentally figuring on 85, make it 95, and if you’re 90, make it 100, then see how that affects your financial planning projections and the date you think you’d like to retire or achieve “Findependence.” Continue Reading…

The 7 eternal truths of personal finance

The print edition of today’s Financial Post (June 10, page FP9) is running the first of a series of seven articles by me entitled “The Seven Eternal Truths of Personal Finance.

Eternal Truth No. 1 is Live below Your Means.

The online link is here.

Note there is also a short video accompanying the online article, and a growing number of comments below the piece.

Here is a preamble I wrote for it:

Series Rationale: One of the most experienced personal finance writers in North America is the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig. As he wrote here after writing his 250th Intelligent Investor column, he confessed that there are only a handful of personal finance stories out there:

“I was once asked, at a journalism conference, how I defined my job. I said: My job is to write the exact same thing between 50 and 100 times a year in such a way that neither my editors nor my readers will ever think I am repeating myself. That’s because good advice rarely changes, while markets change constantly.”

In this seven-part series, I look back on my two decades plus of writing about money to distill it all down to these “seven eternal truths.”

As far as I know, the second instalment will run a week from now.

We may be saving enough, yet still not be ready for retirement

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Lisa Taylor

By Lisa Taylor, Challenge Factory

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Recently, Malcolm Hamilton’s C.D. Howe Institute paper, Do Canadians Save Too Little?, challenged the prevailing view that Canadians are not financially prepared for retirement. His Financial Post column summarized the key findings of his paper and highlighted that many of the assumptions made about retirement are not accurate. Canadians are saving and the determination of how much saving is enough is dependent on many non-financial factors. [See also the Hub’s blog on this: JC]

Indeed, the question of “retirement readiness” is more complicated than calculations predicting financial security.

Meaning of “Retirement” has changed

Retirement has changed. Every formal definition of the verb “to retire” focuses on retreat, withdrawal and conclusion. The original meaning of the word included a complete withdrawal from work, a focus on rest or seclusion, a retreat from battle or the time to go to bed. We retire equipment when it is taken out of service. We retire a bond by taking it out of circulation. Continue Reading…