Remember the 1983 hit song “I Want a New Drug” by Huey Lewis and the News? It wasn’t about recreational drugs at the time. It was more about what drugs were doing for our culture, helping us live longer and attacking different kinds of diseases and maladies.
When you look at your life, you realize you have probably made some big mistakes—hopefully with small amounts of money or minimal physical harm. No one sails through life mistake-free or regret-free, but it’s about more than just being lucky. In their new book Decisive, authors Chip and Dan Heath take a good look at four big reasons we make mistakes and misjudgments.
My grandmother never drove a car. So after I would give her a ride someplace and drop her off, she’d say, “Thanks for the buggy ride!” I thought that was cute, but she also said something else that stuck with me whenever my siblings and I were behaving impetuously. “Now, Gary, remember: there’s always another streetcar.” Her point was to be patient and to avoid making hasty decisions that would eventually have to be undone.
One of the most difficult decisions for families is whether to move a loved one to a continuing care retirement community. It involves boomers as well as their parents because there are myriad financial, emotional and support issues.
If you’re getting close to the end of your career, chances are that more and more people are suggesting you should think about retiring. Or if people aren’t saying it to you directly, maybe it’s in the back of your mind.
In this post, our third in a series about aging gracefully, we’ll explore various options for continuing care retirement communities. In our two previous posts, we talked about family conversations that need to be had, primarily by boomers who are charged with supporting elderly parents or relatives and we talked about the pros and cons of enabling the elderly to stay put at home. Again, the majority of elderly folks want the freedom and independence of staying at home. But there’s a third option: continuing care retirement communities, which have really morphed over the last couple of decades and have quite a bit to offer. Just remember that most continuing care communities will not accept new residents whose health has already deteriorated past a certain point—so you can’t wait on this decision indefinitely.
Last week, we talked about family conversations around aging gracefully. Here we’re going to talk about the pros and cons of enabling the elderly to stay at home. According to a 2010 AARP study, nearly 90 percent of people over the age of 65 said they want to stay in their homes as long as possible.
Retirement is one of life’s biggest transitions, and the first question many people ask is, “When should I start to take my Social Security benefits?” Do you need the cash flow right away, or can you afford to wait to start collecting? If you’re not sure, go through a projection of your balance sheet, your cash flow and taxes to see if Social Security really needs to be part of your income as early as age 62. Or, can you defer it to a later date.
As we move closer to National Financial Literacy Month in April, this is our fourth weekly post about age-specific financial literacy. If you’re just joining this series, in Part 1 we discussed how children can learn about donating, investing, spending and saving. In Part 2 we talked about getting young adults launched on the right financial path right out of high school or college. And in Part 3 we addressed the five major concerns that all of us have about money in our prime income-producing years to get to our retirement years. And now, we’ll focus on folks who are retired, typically age 60, 65 and older.
One of the biggest transitions we make in life is going from actively working for a living to active retirement. This came up again the other day when a client I had been working with for many years came in. Let’s call her Judy. Judy’s husband had retired several years earlier and she was ready to explore her own transition.
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