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Your Best Work May Be Yet to Come
Tweet Share on Facebook March 31, 2010 Comment (3)While you may not be up on the lives of the great poets, it turns out that many of them did not hit their stride until their 50s or 60s. True, many made their mark much earlier. But as University of Chicago economist David Galenson argues in a recent research paper, it has become common wisdom that great poetry is the province of the young. Ditto for accomplishments in many other endeavors in the creative arts. The only problem, he says, is that this wisdom is wrong.
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Determine Your Future Social Security Benefits
Tweet Share on Facebook March 29, 2010 Comment (6)"Your Social Security Statement" is an annual update on how much you're entitled to in the way of benefits. The Social Security Administration begins mailing this early in your working life. It's a very useful document and a great aid in financial planning. The agency also periodically produces sample benefit calculations that help people understand how much of their retirement needs will be covered by Social Security.
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A recent set of illustrations from the agency reflects what it calls a "full-lifetime average earnings level"—a person's highest 35 years of earnings, indexed for wage inflation, with the assumption that they survive to at least the age of 65 without becoming disabled. Its samples use full-lifetime averages of $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, and what it calls the "steady maximum" employee, who began working at the age of 22 and earned at least the maximum amount of earnings each year on which Social Security taxes are due (actually, they're called Old Age Survivor and Disability Income taxes).
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Roth IRA Conversion Will Never Look Better
Tweet Share on Facebook March 26, 2010 Comment (11)Despite being bombarded with ads and related information urging investors to consider Roth IRA conversions, baby boomers appear comfortable staying right where they are—on the fence. New rules that took effect this year remove income ceilings for IRA conversions and allow two years for people to pay any tax obligations incurred in the conversion.
USAA, the large insurance and financial services company, surveyed boomers in July 2009 and February of this year. Awareness of the new conversion rules increased nearly 20 percentage points to 58 percent. But 90 percent of boomers said this year that they would either not do a conversion or are unsure about it. Little changed—92 percent provided similar responses in last year's poll.
[See U.S. News's list of the Best Mutual Funds for 2010, and use our Mutual Fund Score to find the best investments for you.]
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Recession May Change Your Relocation Choice
Tweet Share on Facebook March 24, 2010 CommentThe economy's health is most often measured in national terms. However, the recession and painfully slow recovery have not been felt the same across the country. The Brookings Institution tracks the health of the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas. Late-stage Boomers and others thinking about where they want to retire should pay attention to how the recession has affected urban areas.
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Surge in Multigenerational Households
Tweet Share on Facebook March 21, 2010 Comment (4)Fifty million Americans, including rising numbers of seniors, live in households with at least two adult generations, and often three. That's approaching one in six Americans -- a significant percentage. In a "forward to the past" finding, the Pew Research Center said the number of such households is reversing a century-old trend. Since the 1900s, it noted in a recent study, Americans have moved away from home when they reached adulthood, and generally they've stayed away. Likewise, the numbers of persons over the age of 65 who live alone had been on a 100-year upward curve.
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Boomers Seeking Personalized Volunteering
Tweet Share on Facebook March 18, 2010 Comment (5)If you have time and an interest in volunteering, you literally can create your own program. Aided by Internet sites that match needs and volunteers, along with other "do it yourself" online tools, boomers are rewriting the book on how volunteering works.
[See America's Best Places to Retire.]
AARP has kicked off a large volunteer effort through its Create the Good program and website. "People want more flexibility in their volunteering," says Barb Quaintance, AARP senior vice president for volunteer and civic engagement. There is a preference for self-directed volunteer efforts—more than half of all boomers select this approach, according to AARP—that allow people to satisfy their needs as well as those of the recipients they help.
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Please Make End-of-Life Plans Now
Tweet Share on Facebook March 17, 2010 Comment (1)Early last month, Jane Brody, The New York Times personal health columnist, learned that her husband, Richard, was dying from late-stage lung cancer. Now, he is gone. After 43 years of marriage, having six weeks to say good-bye is the barest sliver of time, a relative finger-snap. Yet as Brody knows so well, and explained so touchingly in her column, that is the way of things.
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Americans Still Dreamers -- About Retirement
Tweet Share on Facebook March 14, 2010 Comment (4)How about a Tea Party movement for retirement readiness? There is rising public opposition to out-of-control federal budget deficits and fiscal policies that we can't afford. We need a similar movement to get the public to wake up to the very, very unpleasant news that awaits millions and millions of Americans in their later years.
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Generic Drug Savings Stuck in Passing Lane
Tweet Share on Facebook March 11, 2010 CommentGeneric drugs comprise 70 percent of all U.S. prescriptions but less than 23 percent of the roughly $300 billion in 2009 prescription drug sales—and more than half of those generics were made by the branded companies themselves. Meanwhile, the backlog of generics applications before the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Generic Drugs has soared to an estimated 1,900, and the approval time for generic applications has slowed until it averages more than 26 months.
Faster approvals are provided to so-called first-time generics. These represent the initial generic approval of a branded drug that has come off of patent production or whose patents have been successfully challenged. But generic-drug advocates say the real savings of generics aren't realized until the second, third, and fourth generic versions are in the marketplace. That's when aggressive price competition drives down prices of all versions of a drug.
[See the High Cost of Growing Older.]
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Older Donors and Recipients Aid Transplants
Tweet Share on Facebook March 10, 2010 Comment (1)We're all getting older, and that applies to organ donors and recipients as well. Demand for organs far exceeds supply. According to data from the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), more than 106,000 persons are now on the waiting list for an organ transplant. During the first 11 months of last year, slightly more than 26,000 transplants were performed in the U.S. People awaiting kidney transplants comprise 80 percent of the waiting list, while candidates for liver transplants make up 15 percent of the list. Other transplant needs include the pancreas, heart, lung, and intestine, plus multiple-organ transplants.
[See Best Affordable Places to Retire.]
