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.
Here’s my latest MoneySense blog, based on a Fidelity media briefing on Monday. Click on the red type to go directly to the piece at MoneySense.
For one-stop shopping and archival purposes, here it is again below, with different photos and subheads.
Peter Drake, Fidelity Canada
By Jonathan Chevreau
You’re probably going to live longer than you think but it if you’re worried about outliving your money, planning to work in retirement is not a panacea, warns Toronto-based Fidelity Investments Canada ULC.
At a media briefing on Monday, Fidelity Canada’s Peter Drake, vice president, Retirement & Economics Research urged those still saving for retirement that they have to take more individual responsibility for their future after work. “You’re going to live longer than you think,” he said, citing steadily rising Life Expectancy statistics going back to 1921. Someone born in 1921 would have a Life Expectancy of about 58, a figure that passed 70 for someone born in the mid 1950s and which passed 80 shortly after the new millennium.
Can an “Encore Career” bridge the gap?
Certainly, the latest data from the 2014 Fidelity Retirement Survey released at the event suggests those falling short of their retirement savings goals are counting on some kind of paying “encore career” to make up the difference. While only 20% of those already retired plan to rely on income from a full-time or part-time job, fully 47% of those still in the workforce expect to have some form of a paying “encore career,” said Drake.
Many will rely on Savings and Housing
Non-retirees also put their hopes into Savings and Housing as a way to make ends meet in Retirement. While only 58% of current retirees say they will rely on income generated from savings in an RRSP or RRIF, fully two thirds of non-retirees (66%) plan to do so. Similarly, while only 36% of retirees believe their home equity will help boost their retirement income, half of non-retirees are counting on it.
Clearly, something has to give and that something appears to be the fond notion that people can just keep working past the traditional retirement age of 65. “Planning to work in retirement is not a retirement plan,” Drake cautioned.
Saying you’ll “just keep working” is of course easily said. Indeed, I’ve given that advice to anyone who’s not quite sure whether they have enough money to retire or not. As I quipped on the radio the other day, it’s better to arrive at the train station five minutes early than five minutes late: similarly, when it comes to saving for retirement, it’s better to oversave than undersave. Your children and the government will thank you for over-saving.
“Just Keep Working” not always possible
Unfortunately, Fidelity’s research shows you can’t count on working in retirement. The poll of some 1,400 Canadians found that of those not working, fully one in five retirees would like to work if they could. However, 15% can’t find a job and 23% say employers aren’t interested in employing retirees.
Then there are health and health care issues. Drake says 38% of retirees not working have health issues that prevent them from doing so. And even for those who are themselves healthy, 12% have to care for another family member. Out-of-pocket health care costs are an important consideration for retirees, Drake said. Even though this is Canada, 30% of health costs are not funded publicly, putting more pressure on finances the older you get. Citing per capital public health care expenditures, the big blips are right after birth and then after 65. The per capita annual expenditure is well under $5,000 from age one to age 64 but hits $5,828 between 65 and 69, passes $10,000 between 75 and 79 and really starts to spike after age 85 – past $20,000 –hitting a peak of more than $24,000 after age 90.
Drake noted that generally speaking, women can expect to outlive men, but the longer they do, the more the problems of dementia – especially Alzheimer’s – can arise.
Challenges of Longevity
Another byproduct of extended longevity is that inflation really starts to bite into the purchasing power of a typical retirement nest egg. While inflation has been low and consistent since the early 1990s, it could rise in the future, Drake warned. And even low inflation can reduce purchasing power. A nest egg of $50,000 today would have the purchasing power of just $30,479 25 years from now even with relatively benign inflation of 2%. If inflation were 3%, the purchasing power of that $50,000 would fall to less than half 25 years later: $23,882. And at 4% inflation, it would have the spending punch of just $18,757.
2.) Longer life expectancy (See also the Hub’s Longevity & Aging section for more on this trend.) Go the full link at USA Today to click on its Life Expectancy Calculator.
3.) Social Security (or for Canadians, CPP/OAS/GIS. More on that in Monday’s Financial Post)
4.) Choices in the financial marketplace: stocks, bonds, insurance, annuities, mutual funds and ETFs, real estate, commodities, hedge funds
Today’s blog title comes from Chapter 14 of The Upside of Aging, a book we mentioned several weeks ago at sister site FindependenceDay.com. This is recommended reading for anyone nearing the traditional retirement age. It consists of 16 essays from various experts, all of whom look at the topic of longevity through various lenses: urban planning, global demographics, healthcare and pharmaceutical research and so on. For example, Ken Dychtwald of Age Wave pens an interesting essay titled “A Longevity Market Emerges.”
Pictured below is Dan Houston, president of Retirement, Insurance and Financial Services for the US-based Principal Financial Group, who wrote the chapter I flagged in the title.
Retirees can expect one spouse to reach 90
Dan Houston
Houston begins by observing that because of longer expected life spans, the mind-set around retirement is evolving, and for the better. “Couples age 65 now have a 45 per cent chance that at least one will live to age 90,” Houston says, citing the Society of Actuaries, “This may be the first time in history where someone spends more years in retirement than in a traditional working career.”
The downside is of course financial: living another 20 to 40 years after leaving the workplace comes with a “substantial cost,” Houston says, “one that has to be funded. It’s an increasingly challenging prospect given inflation, the high cost of health care, and the risk of outliving savings.”
Try living on $400/month
The statistics, at least in the U.S., are not encoring. Fewer than four in ten pre-retiree households (aged 55 to 70, not yet retired) have financial assets of US$100,000. And even if they did have that amount on the nose, it would generate guaranteed lifetime income of just $400 a month.
Many think they’ll need less income in later life than recommended and many plan to draw down on assets at such high rates (9% a year on average) that assets will be depleted within 13 years. The recommended “safe” annual withdrawal rate is closer to 4%. They underestimate the cost of unreimbursed health care costs: in the U.S. Houston estimates a moderately health retired couple will need US$250,000 just to cover health care expenses and premiums throughout retirement. This is one area that Canadians may be ahead because of our universal health care system.
Don’t count on working in retirement
I’ve said before that the solution to this is to “just keep working,” but of course this may not always be an option. It’s a sad fact that agism still prevails in the workplace and costly older workers may be asked to leave before they’re ready to do so; and eventually body or mind may not permit full-time work even if one can find a willing employer. Houston says pre-retirees tend to overestimate their ability to work for income in retirement: more than two thirds expect to be able to supplement retirement income with some work but in reality, only one in five retirees actually works. That statistic, Houston observers, “reflects availability of work, as well as ability to work.”
Just as disturbing is the fact that 55% of American workers, and 39% of retirees, report having a problem with their level of debt. And those who do manage to save are not saving enough: 43% of workers report that neither they nor their spouse is currently saving for the future, while 57% report the total value of savings and investments is under US$25,000.
Four key investment risks
Even where there is ample savings to invest, Houston lists for key risks: inflation, market volatility, income and longevity. These are all linked: the longer you live, the more inflation can cut into your income. Consider this alarming stat on inflation’s power to erode savings: a dollar invested int he S&P500 in 1971 grew to $2.27 by 1982 but on an inflation-adjusted basis, that dollar depreciated to 96 cents. Houston notes that even annual inflation of 3% will cut a retiree’s purchasing power in half.
This calls for investments that have a fighting chance against inflation: Houston mentions Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS, known in Canada as Real Return Bonds or RRBs); commodities, global REITs, natural resource stocks and Master Limited Partnerships.
As if that’s not all enough to keep a retiree awake at night, Houston reminds readers that the “insolvency” date for America’s Social Security system keeps moving closer: 2033, according to Washington’s May 2013 estimate. Meanwhile the over-65 population will double between 2010 and 2050.
As has been noted elsewhere, every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 65. While Canada’s combo of CPP and OAS seems on relatively solid ground, I continue to believe the best way to prepare for a long-lived retirement is to spread your income sources around: employer pensions, savings in RRSPs, TFSAs and non-registered plans, the government plans mentioned above, some part-time work or business income and perhaps rental income from investment real estate.
There are many fundamental reasons for believing that stock markets may have embarked on a long-term bull market comparable to those in the 1950s and 1960s, or the 1980s and 1990s, and that this process is nearer its beginning that its end.
He presents four arguments for a “structural bull market.”
1.) The worst financial and economic crisis in recent memory has ended and most of the world economy is enjoying “decent, if unspectacular, growth.”
2.) While not perfect, economic and financial policies around the world are predictable and so “unlikely to cause further market disruptions.”
3.) Technology continues to advance and innovation should stimulate investment and consumer demand.
4.) Inflation is “almost nonexistent” in the advanced economies, so “interest rates are guaranteed to stay low for a very long time.”
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