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By Jonathan Chevreau
Families confronted with dementia may be encouraged by this New York Times article this week: Biogen reports its Alzheimer’s drug sharply slowed cognitive decline.
Fortunately, awareness of the scourge of dementia has been greatly raised by the success of the novel and then film, Still Alice, about a Harvard professor who suffers from early onset Alzheimer’s. The movie version debuted last autumn at the Toronto International Film Festival and Julianne Moore won an Academy Award for her performance. Just before the Hub launched in November, our sister site ran this piece, entitled The downside of rising longevity: Dementia.
But on the plus side of extended longevity come the stories of those who found business or creative success only late in life. Check out this piece posted earlier this weekend in the Hub’s Encore Acts section: Hope for late-bloomer Boomers: Success as an Encore Act.
From the Good Financial Cents blog comes 16 hobbies that can actually make you money. We at the Hub have always thought it makes cents (sense) to turn an avocation into a vocation that pays. That’s the whole point of the Encore Acts section of the Hub.
At his Chicago Financial Planner blog, Roger Wohlner takes a look at Schwab’s entry into the robo-adviser space — Schwab Intelligent Portfolios: The Evolution of the Robo Adviser.
On his web site, Peter Grandich (author of Confessions of a Wall Street Whiz Kid) elaborates on his acquaintance with some Canadian financial figures, including myself and financial planner Paul Philip: Purpose & Possibilities. On Thursday, the Hub published a Q&A between Peter and Paul (such biblical names!) about Paul’s conversion from active management to strategic indexing with the index mutual funds of Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA).
So you’ve amassed a huge nest egg and are ready to enjoy the fruits of Decumulation. Sadly, all those years of tax refunds on RRSPs (or IRAs) will mean the tax bill will finally come due. At BrighterLife.ca writer Dave Dineen asks the pointed question How much have you really saved for Retirement? A similar article was penned here at the Hub a few weeks back by financial planner Patricia Gass in the third part of her Reflections of Spending in the Early Days of Retirement.
Meanwhile, over at her Retirement Redux site, Sheryl Smolkin reflects on lessons learned during a much-deserved two-week vacation: 8 things we learned on our vacation. One of them was “how we don’t want to retire.”
Over at the Boomer & Echo blog, Robb Engen asks whether your bank deserves your loyalty, offering these 350 reasons to switch your banking. We often run Robb’s blogs on the Hub, generally on Thursdays. You definitely want to check out his last two about Canada’s still world-beating high mutual fund MERs and the coming overhaul of the financial industry via CRM-2.
