Tag Archives: life expectancy

How to age gracefully

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How can you age gracefully? What exercise, diet, or wellness tips should people in their 50s follow?

To help those in their 50s age gracefully, we asked business professionals and marketing experts this question for their best wellness tips. From meditating every day to keeping up with good dental health, there are several great exercise, diet, and wellness tips that may help you age gracefully.

Here are 10 exercise, diet, and wellness tips for people in their 50s:

  • Give Yourself Permission to Take Care of Yourself
  • Mediate Everyday
  • Give Your Body What It Loves
  • Customize Your Routines
  • Focus on Mental Wellness
  • Minimal Processed Food
  • Get Some Fresh Air
  • Dental Health
  • Realistic Goals and Consistent Action
  • Low Impact Workouts

Give yourself permission to take care of yourself

Adopting healthy habits is key to a lifetime of health and wellness.  Finding ways to reduce stress such as meditation or even a walk and focus on a clean diet that energizes rather than slows you down. In addition to physical exercise, exercising your mind is key to aging gracefully. Reading often, learning new skills and information, social interaction, and even using meditation to clear your mind. Giving yourself permission to take care of you, is key! — Carol Bramson, Side by Side

Meditate every day

It may sound cliche, but meditation is the best way to age gracefully! I am a firm believer that if you want to look better on the outside, you must start on the inside. By meditating every day, you can cleanse your mind and rid yourself of the stress and negative thoughts that weigh you down. You will be surprised by how much of a difference mediation will truly have on your skin, posture, and overall glow: it is the best-kept beauty secret since ancient times. — Nikitha Lokareddy, Markitors

Give your body what it loves

Although I am not in my 50s, I have found that as I have matured, I have gotten to know myself and my body a lot better! For me, aging gracefully is all about simplicity and consistency. I know what foods my body loves, what workouts improve my physical and mental strength, and what products I can’t live without. All in all, my tip is to stick to what you know. — Vanessa Molica, The Lash Professional

Customize your routines

As someone who works in healthcare, I have a unique perspective on how you can age gracefully inside and out! Many people think that copying the workout and skincare routines of beautiful celebrities will do the trick, but the key is to customize your routines for your body. The only way to do that accurately is to consult professionals. Dermatologists, nutritionists, and trainers have the tools and knowledge to ensure that your age is nothing but a number! — Dan Reck, MATClinics

Focus on Mental Wellness

Whether that means tackling daily brain exercises or relaxing your mind on a recreational vacation, focusing on mental wellness is one critical area for people to focus on in their fifties. Keep the mind clear and fresh, because the mind leads the body. — Randall Smalley, Cruise America

Minimal Processed Food

Staying active and reducing stress are two key elements that contribute to aging well. When it comes to diet, there’s a large fixation on certain “superfoods” that are key to longevity. In reality, eating a variety of wholesome, minimally processed foods is key to keeping down inflammation in the body and aging well. Because the eyes can show acute signs of aging, opting for a safe and effective treatment like an eye lift is a great way to age with grace. — Michael Herion, Carrot Eye Center

Get some fresh air

As you get older, lots of people lose their sense of adventure and stop enjoying all the great outdoors have to offer. Regardless of whether you prefer a light hike, a horseback ride, or a day on the water fishing, get outside! Continue Reading…

Retired Money: Whether you’re a stock or a bond may determine when to take CPP/OAS

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When to take CPP/OAS? My latest MoneySense Retired Money column passes on a fresh perspective on the old topic of whether you should take CPP or OAS early or late. You can find the full piece by clicking on the highlighted text here: Why aggressive stock investors should consider taking CPP early.

One of the main sources cited in the piece is fee-for-service financial planner Ed Rempel, who has contributed guest blogs to the Hub in the past. See for example Should I take CPP early? Some Real Life Examples or Delay CPP and OAS till 70? Some case studies.

Ed Rempel

When he recently turned 60, Rempel opted himself to take CPP himself because of course he considers himself primarily a “stock” when it comes to investing (using the concept from Moshe Milevsky’s book, Are you a stock or a bond?). He figures he can get good enough returns by investing the early CPP benefits that he will more than make up for the higher payouts CPP makes available for waiting till 65 or 70. Same with OAS, which he figures even balanced investors should take as soon as it’s on offer at age 65.

The corollary of this is that if you consider yourself primarily a fixed-income investor, then you should probably take CPP and perhaps OAS too closer to age 70. Compared to taking CPP at 65, taking it at 70 results in 42% more payments, while OAS is sweeter by 36% by delaying the full five years.

The MoneySense piece also quotes retired financial advisor Warren Baldwin, who chose to take CPP himself by age 66. Like Rempel and most financial advisors, Baldwin has a healthy exposure to equities. But he also cites a couple of other reasons for his decision. Baldwin, (formerly with T. E. Wealth), figures the value of the CPP fund to pay you the pension at age 65 is at least $250,000: more if you factor in its inflation indexing. The latter is an important consideration, especially for those (like Yours Truly), whose Defined Benefit pensions are not indexed to inflation.

Baldwin took his own CPP at 66, a year after his final year of full-time employment income. He did so “mainly for the cash flow and portfolio maintenance.”  But Baldwin has other reasons too. “I do not want to leave the CPP too long into the future in case the government changes the terms on it or the rate of income tax might rise … Look at how many changes they have made in the last 20 years.”

If a retiree’s marginal tax bracket jumped from 35% to 45%, Baldwin says deferred CPP would face a heavier tax load, while if benefits are taken earlier they would be taxed at more modest rates. And if retirees also have significant sums accumulated in RRSPs and RRIFs, the extra income might push up their Marginal Tax Bracket.

CPP survivor benefits also need to be considered

Warren Baldwin

Finally, Baldwin considers the “estate value” of CPP. “If two spouses have the maximum CPP and one dies, the survivor will not get much from the ‘survivor-ship’ aspect of CPP … So, if the ‘value’ of the CPP at 65 is in the range of $300,000, then if you die before you collect, there is quite a loss. Continue Reading…

Should you take early CPP benefits or defer as long as possible?

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By Chris Nicola

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

One question that often comes up about Canada Pension Plan (CPP) benefits is whether to take it earlier or later. If you Google this, you’ll get different answers: some say take it early, others say take it later. It seems the experts don’t quite agree, so I wanted to do a thorough analysis myself.

Jim Yih explains that the break-even between taking CPP at 60 vs. 65 is at age 77. In other words, if I live past age 77 I’ll be better off my taking CPP at 65 rather than 60. Based on this he concludes that one should probably start taking CPP at 60, just to be sure. However, I’m still left wondering: “Am I more, or less, likely to live past age 77?”

Now, before I dive into the analysis, let me quickly explain how taking CPP earlier, or later, works. Assuming you will be age 60 after 2016, the CPP early and late withdrawal rules work like this:

  • If you take CPP before 65, you take a 7.2% penalty per year on your CPP payments (up to 36% at age 60)
  • For each year you wait after 65, you gain an 8.4% increase in your CPP payments (up to 42% at age 70)

On face value, 42% more does seem like a pretty compelling case for waiting, but, is it? The catch here is that, it will depend on how long you live. Will you live long enough to capitalize on the larger payments, if you wait to start taking CPP? The real question is: Are you, statistically speaking, going to receive more, or less, total CPP by waiting?

The hard working mathematicians at Statistics Canada have provided us with this handy table, which shows how long the average Canadian can expect to live until, given they have already reached a particular age. What I’m interested in, is what age the average person at age 60 can expect to live until.

Males maximize CPP at 68, women at 70

Currently, a man at age 60 can expect to live another 23 years (age 83), and a woman about 26 (age 86). As these are averages, they seem like reasonable numbers to use for our analysis, and age 60 is the earliest point at which we are able to consider taking CPP.

Continue Reading…

Never mind a few years more Longevity, what about Immortality?

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longforthisworldbookWe’ve reviewed several books about Longevity over the nearly two years the Hub has been running, the most recent one being Mark Venning’s review of The 100-Year Life. (See Superlongevity: The 100-Year Life in a Blue Zone).

I mentioned this book in my talk Thursday to T.E. Wealth, in the context of the prospect of an 80-year investment time horizon for Millennials. (Implication of that: 100% stocks!)

But until now, for obvious reasons, we have held off on the “farther out” topic of immortality.

Even so, there is a growing literature on the topic of what I might term “ultra-longevity.” One in this camp is Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality.

Published in 2010 by science writing teacher Jonathan Weiner, the book focuses on a real believer in the possibility of human immortality: one Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, who he quotes thus: “When you start talking’ about five-hundred year humans, or one-thousan’-year humans, most members of the general public get a li’l bit nervous.”

Indeed, and Weiner himself seems skeptical, despite providing such a platform to Aubrey de Grey. As the back-cover blurb states, “Could we live forever? And if we could — would we want to?”

Continue Reading…

The next Boomer wave: Semi-Retirement

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wave-1031216_640As I argue in my latest online column for MoneySense, published this morning, I believe that the next big wave to be surfed by the baby boom generation will NOT be retirement, but Semi-Retirement. Click on highlighted link to access: Why semi-retirement is the future.

See also my October 18th interview on this topic with CBC On the Money’s Peter Armstrong.

I’ve also argued that the boomers are largely going to be responsible for retiring the very word Retirement. This is of course the central theme of the book I co-authored with former corporate banker Mike Drak: Victory Lap Retirement, which MoneySense excerpted in its Summer retirement issue. See Why you wake up each day. (See also links to two recent reviews and a BNN clip listed at the end of yesterday’s blog: Millennials say Financial Independence defines Adulthood.)

Now a cynic might argue that in making the Victory Lap Argument, necessity is the mother of invention. A lot of us haven’t saved enough to retire in the style to which we’d like to be accustomed. Add to that the decline of corporate Defined Benefit pension plans and minuscule interest rates and there’s a lot to be said (at least financially speaking) for sticking at the old grind for five or ten extra years.

But those extra years don’t have to be spent as an employee in a corporate setting, complete with the challenges of coping with bosses, endless meetings, daily commutes and all the rest of it. There has to be a happy medium between corporate wave slavery and the traditional “full-stop” retirement that amounts to a permanent vacation. Some call this new stage between full-time careers and traditional retirement an encore career or a legacy career. We call it the Victory Lap.

The real wild card is extended Longevity

Continue Reading…