No doubt about it: at some point we’re neither semi-retired, findependent or fully retired. We’re out there in a retirement community or retirement home, and maybe for a few years near the end of this incarnation, some time to reflect on it all in a nursing home. Our Longevity & Aging category features our own unique blog posts, as well as blog feeds from Mark Venning’s ChangeRangers.com and other experts.
COVID-19 continues to have a tremendous impact on every aspect of our lives, from the way we work and connect with friends and family to how we shop and bank. Yet as we look at the world around us changing, the need for social distancing measures and self-isolation has accelerated the pace of digital adoption, especially among a population that is considered highly vulnerable to this pandemic.
While ensuring there continues to be support for seniors available through in-branch visits, we want to keep our seniors safe and that means more focused efforts by phone, and stepping up support to help seniors bank online.
RBC recently initiated customized proactive outreach to seniors, reinforcing the message “be safe, stay home” – and we’ve seen a very positive response from seniors. In the span of just a month, we saw an 84% increase in digital enrollment among clients aged 60+ and a 210% rise in digital activity from seniors who were enrolled, but had not actively used online banking for at least six months. The most actively used online and mobile banking options per week: sending electronic money transfers and making payments.
We understand online or mobile banking can feel intimidating for Canadians of all ages who are first time users. This made it crucial to ensure we could make online and mobile banking as simple and convenient as possible. We set up our “bank easy” hub, with how-to videos and very clear instruction guides, to show how easily – and securely – anyone can bank digitally, using online and mobile banking to do their everyday transactions.
Front-of-the-line access for those over 70
With a significant rise in calls to our contact centre, we are also prioritizing calls from clients over the age of 70: and ensuring seniors get this same “front of the line” access for branch visits. Continue Reading…
Every moment of every day, a cell in our body dies. Don’t worry, it is programmed to do this. However, this continual shedding of cells poses questions about how our body changes with age. We expect to change as we grow older, but we might wonder what is natural and what should cause us worries. Here we explore these changes, so you can know what to expect.
Aging Cells
Our bodies are a composite of millions upon millions of cells. As our cells age, they will function less well and eventually must die. The genes within some cells are programmed to cause this death. Cells can only divide a set number of times. When a cell can no longer divide. The process of apoptosis, as it is called, is a way of old cells making way for new cells. The body you have now is entirely different from the one you had 9 years ago.
Cells can also be damaged by harmful substances. Further damage can be caused by free radicals, which is a natural by-product of the work of cells. There are many foods you can help that will counter the effects of free radicals, and this is worth some research.
Loss of function in our body is usually a result of disorder and not because of this aging process within the cells.
Aging Organs
Obviously, our organs operate as well as the cells that make them up. When older cells die and are not replaced, our organs begin to work less well. Our testes, ovaries, liver and kidneys lose a marked number of cells as we age. The more cells that are lost, the less well the organ will work.
The natural consequence of this loss of cells is that our organs do not function as well as we grow older. However, not all organs lose cells. Our brain does not lose cells through aging, for instance. Most cells are lost in the brain from dysfunctions, such as a stroke or progressive nerve damage.
The function of our internal organs peak at the age of thirty and slowly decline from this point. However, when we peak, we have significantly more capacity than our body needs.
Therefore, declines in health from our organs are unlikely to a result of our age.
Bones and Joints
The first signs of aging usually begin with the musculoskeletal system. Our bones become less dense. Women are more likely to struggle with reduced bone density, known as osteoporosis. This can make the chance of a fracture more likely. The speedup of this process for women is directly linked to the menopause and reduced estrogen in the body.
Bones also decline with age because our body becomes less adept at absorbing calcium. Calcium is an essential mineral for strengthening our bones. Some bones are more likely to weaken that others, for instance, the hip is more likely to break, as are our wrists.
The cartilage at our joints is also susceptible to wear and tear due to age. The weakening of cartilage means that the bones do not rub well over each other, and this can make them open to injury. The consequence of reduced cartilage is arthritis, which is one of the most common disorders of our older age.
Muscles and Body Fat
Our muscles mass will start to decrease from about the age of thirty and will continue to decline into our old age. The decline is partly due to a decrease in physical activity, as our lives slow down, and partly due to a reduction in growth hormones in the body. We slow down as a result of muscle decline too. We lose the fast-twitch muscle fibres first, which then, as a consequence, results in the decrease in the slow-twitch muscles.
However, our bodies only lose about 10 – 15% of our muscle mass naturally over a lifetime. Further loss of muscle is preventable with regular exercise.
The only other explanations for a sudden loss of muscle are diseases and disorders, which either causes muscle death or results in an individual more static than is healthy. If you are restricted to bed rest for a day, you would need to exercise for up to two weeks to regain this lost muscle.
By the age of 75, your body fat will have doubled to what it was in young adulthood. Too much fat and you severely increase your chances of many life-limiting disorders. Consequently, as you grow older, it becomes essential to maintain a healthy diet and exercise regime.
Ruth Hilton is a Nurse Advisor in the continence management division for HARTMANN Direct, a UK-based supplier of incontinence products.
Earlier this week, financial planner and author Riley Moynes featured me on his weekly podcast, Squeezing All the Juice out of Retirement. You can find the 24-minute interview here, using any number of podcasting platforms.
While both those books come up in the podcast, Riley Moynes starts by asking me about why I coined the term Findependence instead of using the more traditional term Retirement.
Most readers of the Hub will by now be familiar with this topic. In fact, one of the first blogs we published when we launched the site in November 2014 was this one on “Which is the better goal: Findependence or Retirement?”
However, for the sake of more recent subscribers, I’ll recap that Findependence is merely a contraction for Financial Independence. And Findependence Day is the day you estimate you will reach your Findependence. All this is explained in the Hub’s sister site and processor, FindependenceDay.com. There you can purchase the Canadian edition of Findependence Day or find a link to the Trafford site to buy the U.S. edition. (The book is a financial novel.) There is also a button at the top right of this site that will take you to the site.
Moynes elicits a fair bit of my recent history since leaving full-time employment in 2014. As i said, I was working from home long before the Covid-19 crisis hit! What is different — and is also discussed in the podcast — is that a year ago, my wife also left her full-time job in the transportation industry, so we’re experiencing the joys and challenges of Findependence together, albeit aided by two well-equipped home offices.
The 4-hour workday
Another topic that we spent some time during the podcast is the concept of the four-hour day. I used to write about this back in my days at the Financial Post, and it also comes up in the book I co-authored with Mike Drak: Victory Lap Retirement. The 4-hour day concept was brought to my attention by a former employer and friend: published in 1955 by William J. Reilly it was titled “How to make your living in Four Hours a Day Without Feeling Guilty About It.” (not to be confused with the more recent Tim Ferris book, The 4-Hour Workweek). Continue Reading…
How can the estate of your American aunt, who lived in the United States and visited Canada only three times, be considered a resident of Canada? And how can the Canada Revenue Agency tax her estate income while the IRS may or may not be able to collect tax on anything? It gets even more interesting if she held her assets in a living trust or held majority ownership in a private corporation.
I came across this exact scenario and it shows what can happen when moving a trust across the border.
In 2003, Tom and his wife Rose settled their trust. They were both U.S. citizens and residents as well as the beneficiaries and trustees of their trust. Both passed away within months of each other in 2017. Tom died first.
When Rose died, their trust was the beneficiary of annuities and an Individual Retirement Account (IRA), and also consisted of
investments in marketable securities,
a corporation owning 50% of a condo,
the other 50% of the same condo,
and some personal property.
Prior to their deaths, Tom and Rose resigned as Trustee, and their niece Anne became the sole Trustee of the U.S. Trust. She also became one of four beneficiaries of the estate upon their passing. Nothing too complex, so far. Right? Except that Anne and the three other beneficiaries happen to be Canadian citizens and residents who never lived in the U.S. or filed U.S. taxes.
What exactly does this mean? Are there tax implications of the trust moving to Canada? The short answer is, yes. Let’s have a quick look at what those implications might be.
First, from the perspective of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), when Anne became Trustee of the trust in February 2017, the trust moved to Canada but retained something known as “grantor trust status in the U.S.” When Rose died in May 2017, the trust then became a non-resident and no longer held grantor trust status for U.S. tax purposes.
What’s so great about grantor trust status? Typically, moving a trust from the U.S. to Canada would result in U.S. tax on the appreciation of trust assets. Because the trust maintained its grantor status after it was moved to Canada, the trust assets were not treated as sold.
That’s the good news, but here’s the straight goods on how the U.S. tax regime treats the disposed assets held within the trust: Continue Reading…
My latest MoneySense Retired Money column is the second part of a series on CPP and survivorship issues. You can find part 2 by clicking on the highlighted headline here: Reconsidering when to take CPP benefits amid Covid-19 risk. You can find the first part here and yesterday’s Hub summary here.
What’s all that about Covid-19 risk? It’s admittedly a bit morbid but after all, retirement survivor benefits are all about expected longevity and mortality. To the extent Covid-19 provides a slightly higher probability of a spouse passing away before expected, it underlines the fact senior couples need to think about survivor benefits. They should have all along, of course, but this crisis just makes the issue that much more tangible.
The main sources in the column are again retired advisor Warren Baldwin, who personally took his own CPP at 66 in part because of survivorship issues, and TriDelta Financial president Ted Rechtshaffen, who tackled the topic in this recent column in the Financial Post. There he described the unfairness of CPP and how it may have “effectively” no survivor benefits. He observed that if a couple both collect full CPP and one dies, the other receives a one-time $2,500 death benefit, but loses the entire ongoing CPP benefits of the deceased.
But if the same couple has one person collecting a full CPP benefit and their partner never paid into the plan and collects $0 CPP, if either dies the net result is they will continue to collect one full CPP benefit. The maximum survivor benefit is 60% of the maximum pension, since no individual can collect more than 100% of a CPP benefit. However, if one person currently receives less than 100%, if the partner dies, that person can top up the CPP payment up to 100% out of the amount being collected by the partner.
For most seniors, dropping combined maximum CPP income (at age 65, in 2019) from $27,600 a year to just $13,800 constitutes a huge hit if both partners contributed a lot to CPP over the years. Rechtshaffen suggested these rules “almost provide an incentive to only have one working partner over the years. It hurts couples in which both partners worked full time.” He also made some suggestions on how Ottawa could redress this unfair situation.
Asher Tward, Tridelta’s VP estate planning, generated quotes on a life-only, $14,110 per annum, single-person annuity, no survivorship, with the payment 2% indexed. He found a typical quote for a 65-year old male with 2% indexation was worth $316,000, while a typical quote for a 65-year old female with 2% indexation was worth $355,000. We also asked what it would cost to buy the same annuity with a 60% survivorship payout to the surviving spouse. The relevant comparison is someone with no spouse or who has a spouse with maximum CPP against a person who has a spouse who has no CPP. For a registered annuity for couples like my wife and I, Tward found a joint annuity with 2% indexation and a 60% survivor benefit was worth $358,000, with either partner being the survivor.
So for a couple with maximum CPP, the total “value” is around $700,000. If they can afford it, they could defer collecting benefits by living off RRSPs and other savings; however those assets are fully estate-protected for either survivors or beneficiaries.
“There is a degree of use-it-or-lose-it in the CPP,” Baldwin concludes, adding it behaves somewhat like a tontine, except with no lump sum at the end.
Similar issues with OAS
OAS presents a similar issue: at just over $7,000 a year, it would have a value around 50% of CPP: about $150,000, so why not collect as soon as possible? Continue Reading…
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