Retirement Planning: The Pig in the Python Syndrome

When it is all said and done and the history books have had a chance to prove and reprove it, Baby Boomers are going to get the blame for everything. Most of the problems we have faced since the term was first coined will be attributed to those who were born between 1946 and 1964.  We sowed the seeds of consumerism, entitlement, privilege, wealth and health and redefined what retirement could be. Boomers saw themselves as different from the previous generations, a cultural swing that through sheer numbers changed how things were done. Boomers have been described as the "pig in the python" a huge generational bulge that was unmistakeable yet somewhat unpredictable as well.
And here we are, tossing around the notion of retirement while our children and sometimes even their children face a future where this will not be possible, at least framed the way Boomers had envisioned.  And as we think about this future of our own, for some a prolonged and redefined work career, the generation we sought so hard to distance ourselves from is closing in on us.

Aging parents are the discussion we don't want to have.  We thought our affluence would have allowed all boats to rise.  Most of could see a growth of our own wealth as being enough to cover all problems should they arise, give us enough to retire on comfortably, live the life of leisure we were so focused on and do so on the investments we made while we were working.  Like so many things we were presented with, we didn't think this through to its endless possibilities.

Aging parents are presenting a great deal of Boomers looking to retire in the next decade with a number of consideration they had previously ignored.  Boomers grew up knowing that everything would be okay.  Give it time, we thought, and a solution will present itself.  Now we have smaller portfolios, redefined dreams and working careers that could extend - if we have remained healthy enough - well beyond what we originally intended. And aging parents.

Here are three things to consider that you may not have fully faced quite yet.

1. There may come a point in the near future when your parents may not be able to live on their own.  This is presenting problems for Boomers that run the emotional gamut. How do you convince an older parent that they are vulnerable to their own inability to live alone in the their own house?  Ignoring the problem is not the answer, and in a vast majority of the situations, is only confronted when there is an accident.  This can add additional costs to an issue that was easier to confront prior to a fall or a dramatic loss of weight.
If you need to enlist a doctor's help, don't hesitate. In many instances, this is the single person that can convince the aging parent that they need someone to come in a cook their meals, tidy-up the house and even do a little shopping for them or with them.

2. Consider the assisted living facility before they need it.  They will all resist it. The sales pitch will be off-putting but like so many things in life, discuss it with friends.  They also have aging parents and are facing the same problems as you. They know or have heard of these places and, if they can't offer any real advice on which one is best, they can offer you some insight on what they are feeling, if they had made the decision and how, and how they feel after-the-fact.

Examining your true motives may not be easy.  If you are asking yourself questions about how this will affect you, you may be asking the wrong questions. If an assisted living facility is something that is simply easier on you, it will be. You will have some peace of mind and a feeling that there is some continuity in your parent's life.  But that may not be shared by your aging parent.  Keep that in mind before signing any long-term commitment with any housing. They may not like it.

3.  Determining that your parent is a danger to themselves and others is perhaps the most difficult - especially if you live a considerable distance from them. They are adults and they are allowed to make mistakes. The only thing you can do in this instance is be persistant, not pushy, but patient in your explanation that it may be time to give up the fight for independence. As Carol L. Rosenblatt, RN, BSN, PHN, attorney, is author of The Boomer's Guide To Aging Parents suggests: "Our ongoing encouragement and respectful, patient offers of help may be heeded over time."

Retirement Planning and Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda (or Old Age and Health, Part Two)

The poem below, because of copyright restrictions and the fact the Shel Silverstein’s people never got back to me after I requested permission to include it in the book goes something like this:

Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda
By Shel Silverstein

All the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
Layin' in the sun,
Talkin' 'bout the things
They woulda coulda shoulda done...
But those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
All ran away and hid
From one little Did.

While the previous post here outlined some of the serious health risks that are under-realized and little acknowledged in most retirement plans, I wanted to spend a moment explaining some of the references that I used for this section.

We will not be the retirees in the commercials. This is bad news for some us and a grim reality for others. The idea that we will enter old age in a different physical condition than we are currenlty in is highly likely. For most of us, that condition will not mean an improved state but rather one that is in need of repair.

We are the woulda-coulda-shouldas that scrimped and saved, lost sleep over money, worked too, too hard, and lived perhaps a bit too well. But living well will present its problems sometime in the future as our bodies will ask us, “what exactly did you do?”

Consider Ellie Metchnikoff (1845-1916), a Russian biologist who studied in Russia and Germany, and after working with Pasteur in Paris, became deputy director of the Pasteur Institute in 1904. He also won the Nobel prize in 1908 for medicine for his work in immunology.



As a biologist, he noticed that his advancing age was bound to complicate things for him. In the preface of his book The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies also written by Ilya Ilyich Metchnikoff and Peter Chalmers Mitchell he wrote: “It is, of course, quite natural that a biologist whose attention has been aroused by noticing in his own case the phenomena of precocious old age should turn to the study of it. Because it is equally plain that such a study could give hope of resisting the decay of an organism which had already for many years been growing old.”

As a scientist, he began his research by looking at the historical and cultural ways peoples around the world treated their elderly members. He was well aware of how the old were thought of in Europe during his time. The sight of these people with the ravages that time took on the body concerned him. What Metchnikoff found made him pause asking why those cultures developed the attitudes toward the elderly and the way they treated their old.




The Melanesian islanders buried their old tribe members alive when they reached a point of uselessness. Natives of Tierra del Fuego would eat an elderly woman in times of famine, he wrote in cool style of an academic, because “dogs could catch seals, whilst old women could not do so.”

But we are civilized now. Right? At the time Metchnikoff wrote his book, a follow-up to his book Nature of Man, old age was nothing to look forward to. Suicide was rampant among the elderly of Metchnikoff’s era, with rates running almost twice that of any other age group. Murder of the old, as was discussed in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” seemed to be justified because of the childlessness, worthlessness, ill-temperedness and poor health of an old woman one might encounter was thought to be “a nuisance to everyone. She does not even now why she should live”.

A Danish law passed in 1891 began what could have been the first governmental type intervention into the deteriorating circumstances of the elderly. Metchnikoff was a biologist and his primary concern was how we age, why we do so in such different degrees and what if anything can be done to cease or at least slow the process. He looked at numerous sources for his answer from the cellular level to the giant Dragon Tree, the baobab, the cypress and of course, the one we are most familiar with, the sequoia of California.

I do however mention Sanford Bennett in the book and mostly to encourage those of use who have abused our bodies more than just a tad over our lifetimes. He found himself, as he writes in his 1912 edition of Old Age: Its Cause and Prevention: The Story of an Old Body and Face Made Young., republished in 2003 by Kessinger Press, “At fifty, I was a physically old man. Many years of a too active business career had resulted in a general physical breakdown.” He continues by describing his state as “wrinkled, partially bald, cheeks sunken, face drawn and haggard, muscles atrophied and thirty years of chronic dyspepsia.” For those of you who may not know what dyspepsia is, the word was and still is a more medical term for upset stomach and acid indigestion. That, he says later caused him to develop a “catarrh” (kind of like a running nose in your gut – it just doesn’t sound very pleasant) “of the stomach”.


Bennett at age 50


But Bennett turned that physical deterioration around as he developed an exercise routine, researched dietary guidelines and wrote his experiences down if only to authenticate his health reversal. Like Metchnikoff, he spent a good deal of time studying the ill effects of aging and developed a way to fix what nature had wronged.


Bennett at age 72


He writes that he was unable to find adequate information about the subject largely because no one prior to him had experienced what he had. So he offered to the public what may have been the first self help book for health designed for the layman.

Retirement planning, like the claim made by Bennett, is not something that you have to accept at face value for what it is. If you focus on your health as an important attribute to a successful plan, the financial end of the equation may just fall right into place.

To answer your question: No. Being healthy will not make you financially savvy. That’s why you have me. But you cannot ignore the cost of poor health on your retirement. We are all aware of the pressures already being exerted on our health system and movement to push more and more of those costs and as well as the decisions of how that care should transpire back to the private citizen.

This will not be the last time we touch on the topic of health and the cost it tallies against your best retirement goals. Poor health almost acts like a tax on those savings, which is yet another important topic we will consider further along.

Retirement Planning and Life Expectancy

No retirement planning book would be complete without a look at life expectancy. Trying to determine how long you might live, whether you will outlive your money and exactly how much money will be needed should you break all-time length of life records affects every plan.

In the book, I point to the work done by Wharton School of Business professors Dean P Foster, whose field is statistics and Lyle Unger, an expert in Genomics and computational biology. Their work on longevity based on how much walking one does was expanded into a full fledged calculator with the addition of Chua Choon Tze, who brought his finance background from the Lee Kong Chian School in Singapore.

The calculator was expanded to include numerous diseases and charts that will narrow your possibilities by ranking you among your peer group.

Included are references to fitness using a maximal treadmill exercise test as a measure of fitness with an initial speed set at 3.3mph, 0% grade for 1st minute, 2% grade for 2nd minute, an increase of 1% for each subsequent minute until 25 minutes thereafter, the speed is increased by 0.2mph each minute until test is terminated

To do this of course, you would need to compare what you think the maximum amount of time that you can stay on the treadmill with mean time for men of 16 minutes 52 seconds and a mean time for women of 11 minutes 28 seconds.

They also asked the user to judge their diet (Dairy, Meat, Grain, Fruit, Vegetable) and their stress level. The following list would have a negative effect on your overall life span:

• Serious Illness in a family member (excluding death)
  
  
• Serious concern about a family member (excluding illness)
  
  
• Death of a family member
  
  
• Divorce or separation
  
  
• Forced to move house
  
  
• Forced to change job
  
  
• Been made redundant
  
  
• Feelings of insecurity at work
  
  
• Serious financial trouble
  
  
• Been legally prosecuted

More fun can be had at NW Mutual's longevity game. As you input the information, your body changes shape and often not for the better. Starting out at the average life expectancy of 74, each question prompts an increase or a decrease in that anticipated age.

There is much more to creating enough wealth to weather a long lifetime. And these calculators and games only hope to illustrate the changes you can make to achieve a longer healthier life. My job is to help you get the money you need.