Longevity & Aging

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.

Longevity and Your Money

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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…

What’s the difference between life annuities and tontines?

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Here’s my latest MoneySense blog, entitled The case for tontines: part 2. It follows Part 1, which ran a week ago both at MoneySense.ca and here at the Hub: Tontine: Retirement Plan of the Future? 

After the first piece ran and even after reading both of Milevsky’s two latest books from cover to cover — one is essentially about annuities, the other about tontines — I realized I was still hazy about the exact difference between life annuities and tontines. I figured that if I was a little uncertain, so would many readers be.

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Moshe Milevsky

Moshe responded with a quick clarification of the two major differences, as well as sending me a recent presentation he made that touched on both concepts. Whether all these concepts could be incorporated into the ongoing debate about an expanded and voluntary CPP remains to be seen, but see today’s other guest blog by Pierre Laporte, entitled Voluntary CPP is an old idea … has its time finally come?

Not anywhere near as old as tontines, mind you!

For archival and one-stop shopping purposes, we also show the blog below, with a few subheads and images added: Continue Reading…

Weekly Wrap: Voluntary CPP expansion, Social Security fixes, Longevity Insurance, Tontine Annuities

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View of Ottawa on the Grunge Canadian Flag

A lot of coverage this week for the Tories’ floating of a “voluntary” expansion of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP: Canada’s equivalent of Social Security, if you also include its Old Age Security program), especially when you consider the details were pretty scant.

Incidentally, the issue is quite similar with Social Security in the U.S. This week, Reuters ran a piece entitled How to use Social Security to fix Retirement Inequality. It makes the case for “expanding” Social Security benefits “to help people who need it most.”

The Hub ran two pieces on the proposed CPP expansion: an initial one that felt it looked promising, despite the lack of detail: Bring it on!, followed by a guest blog by Retirement Redux’s Sheryl Smolkin: Voluntary CPP contributions will favour high earners.

Time to bring back Tontine Annuities? Continue Reading…

The 6 stages of Financial Independence

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Sales funnel. Marketing or Business ChartBy Jonathan Chevreau

The Financial Independence Hub

I’ve been doing lots of reading lately about a new stage of life between MidLife and traditional Retirement. You can read the details in Marc Freedman’s The Big Shift, which confirmed what I’ve been slowly piecing together since my career change this time last year.

The  Financial Independence Hub organizes blogs in six categories that are quite similar to the Ages & Stages that MoneySense has long espoused, both in its articles and in its Special Interest Publication, Guide to Retiring Wealthy. You can find these six blog categories in the horizontal grey band that appears below the horizontal blue band at the top of the Hub’s home page.

Ages & Stages: The Life Cycle approach to Investing

Continue Reading…

Re-introducing Tontine Annuities Might Shave Years Off Your Findependence Day

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Moshe Milevsky

By Moshe A. Milevsky

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Here is a non-surprising fact. Most retired individuals do not choose to voluntarily annuitize their accumulated wealth or savings at retirement. They prefer the lump sum. This has been christened by financial economists: “the annuity puzzle” and has been the topic of Ph.D. theses for decades. I am guilty of supervising a few of these myself.

Sadly, life annuities are relatively unpopular – especially compared to stocks and bonds — in a large part of the world and simply unavailable in most others. Indeed, the few jurisdictions and countries in which there is a sizeable market for annuity products – such as Canada or the U.S. — it is often driven by tax-advantaged treatment and/or government “nudging and defaults” as opposed to an intrinsic consumer appreciation for longevity insurance. Like most insurance products, they are ‘sold’ but rarely purchased.

Could the past hold the key to Longevity Insurance?

Continue Reading…