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.

The Scourge of Dementia: Taking Charge of Your Health

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dougdahmer
Doug Dahmer

By Doug Dahmer

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

“Alzheimer’s disease – the degenerative brain condition that is not content to simply kill its victims, it must first snuff out their essence.” – Time Magazine, October 31, 2010

By age 85, an individual has a 50% chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a matter of a flipping a coin. Chances are if you don’t have Alzheimer’s, you will be caring for someone who does.

 

The Grim Statistics about Dementia
• The incidence of Alzheimer’s disease is reaching epidemic proportions. Today, 500,000 Canadians have the disease or a related dementia.

• Alzheimer’s disease is considered the second most feared disease of aging.
• While 1: 11 people 65 years of age and older suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, 71,000 Canadians < 65 have the disease.
• It is estimated that one person is diagnosed every five minutes and it is projected that by 2035, 1.1 million Canadians will be living with Alzheimer’ or a related dementia. Continue Reading…

What if you make it to 95?

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Depositphotos_51530003_xsHere’s my column from the print edition of MoneySense magazine that’s being run online today at MoneySense.ca. Regular readers here at the Aging & Longevity section of the Financial Independence Hub will recognize several of the major themes.

In particular, they will note the phrase “Plan for Longevity, Not Retirement,” which I credit to Mark Venning of ChangeRangers.com, whose blog occasionally can be seen in this section.

Rising Life Expectancy: Are you ready for a 40-year Retirement?

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Ermos Erotocritou, CFP

By Ermos Erotocritou, CFP

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Are you planning for a 40-year retirement?

The question may sound absurd but if you are a healthy Canadian in your 40s having a 40-year retirement is not just possible but very likely.

According to the World Health Organization, a male’s life expectancy in Canada is 80 and 84 if you are female. Let’s take the half-way point between 84 and 80 and say longevity will be age 82.

The median retirement age in 2011 was 63.2 for men and 61.4 for women. The half-way point will be age 62. It seems logical to calculate your retirement years as your life expectancy minus the age in the year in which you retire. If you retire at age 62 and expect to live to age 82 then you should save up enough money to generate income for 20 years right? Wrong!

Planning for your retirement paycheque is a lot more complicated. Life expectancy is a moving target. In Canada, we have increased life expectancy by 5 years over the past 25 years. Increased life expectancy has been consistent for decades and there’s no indication it will stop.

If we continue at this pace, we will add 10 additional years of longevity within the next 50 years. If you are in your 40s today, it’s quite reasonable to expect your life expectancy will increase from 82 to 92. But now it gets even more complicated. Life expectancy for a surviving spouse is longer than an individual’s. As long as one or both spouses survive, savings are required to support their retirement.

Estimating your own life expectancy

Continue Reading…

Global Life Expectancy up more than 6 years since 1990

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Longevity Word Clocks Time Flying Durable Lasting Experience ConBy Jonathan Chevreau

Life expectancy around the world has risen by a whopping six years since 1990, according to a global survey released Friday.

As the CBC reports here, these longer lifetimes are occurring in both rich countries and poor ones, although for different reasons.

In the affluent west, it’s driven by falling death rates from the two big scourges of cancer and heart disease. In poorer countries, increased life expectancy is the result of progress in fighting tuberculosis, malaria and diarrhea. The tragic exception, however, is southern sub-Saharan Africa, where life expectancy has actually fallen five years because of rising deaths from HIV/AIDS.

The 2013 Global Burden of Disease Study was published in the Lancet medical journal.

For those born in 2012, life expectancy in Canada is now 80 for males and 84 for women, according to this report in May of 2014.

The Hub’s Take

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An Aging World: Not to be obsessed

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We’ve mentioned Mark Venning and ChangeRangers.com several times in this site as well as sister site FindependenceDay.com. His insights on Aging and Longevity are a big reason why we have included a regular section of the Hub on this topic. One of his aphorisms is particularly insightful and directly related to financial planning and financial independence: “Plan for longevity, not retirement.”

As the previous blog in this section (by Doug Dahmer)  explained, the fatal flaw in most retirement plans is failing to take into account extended longevity. Mark also regularly writes on this theme, as in a recent piece on Financing Longevity, which also provides a nod to the Financial Independence Hub.

Below, specially for the Hub, Mark has composed a year-end reflection on these themes, based on his recent travels. We hope to run more like this in the new year!

markvenning
Mark Venning, ChangeRangers.com

By Mark Venning,

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Hardly a day goes by that there isn’t some symposium, book or report (not to mention a blog post or three like this one) about an aging world, longevity and retirement. You can even Google search longevity calculators that can project how long you can expect to live. It’s an aging obsession.

As Ted C. Fishman says in his 2010 book, Shock of Gray – “…although the aging world is the sum of choices made by large populations, how we navigate the future of this world – how we love and care for ourselves and those we cherish – will also be an intensely personal matter.”

Continue Reading…