If you’re approaching or actually entering your retirement years, be aware that it’s not a homogenous era. It’s actually quite transitional with roughly three periods that are distinct from one another. The way you live and spend will vary as you progress through these years.
The big unknown is how long each period will be for you. That will depend on a number of factors but is mostly reliant on two key ingredients: your finances and your health. Here’s a summary of the 3 periods:
The Vibrant Period
You’re a new arrival to retirement. You’re healthy and vigorous and can travel, seek adventure and enjoy hobbies. Spending tends to be fairly high, with most of your money going toward enjoying your newfound freedom. You’ll want to adopt a “Do it now mentality” because tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone.
The Transition Period
Aging is now catching up with you. You start to physically slow down; you’re not as mentally sharp as you used to be. As you cut back on traveling and venture out less often, spending generally falls since you simply aren’t engaging in as many expensive activities.
You strive to keep your independence, but now need to seek help in areas of your life. You may consider downsizing your house and simplifying life. Aging in place becomes a focus, but, more and more, you need to hire people to do housework, prep meals, and maintain the yard.
The Assisted Final Period
In the last phase of your retirement, you may have significant health issues that require care. There’s a good chance you’ve outlived your close friends and perhaps even your life partner.
It’s important not to play ostrich in planning for this, don’t be in some form of false denial, it’s been surveyed and only 14% of working Americans believe they will need ongoing daily assistance at some point during retirement, yet 66% of us actually will – take notice.
For many retirees, a nursing home or some form of long-term care becomes necessary. But even for those who can care for themselves independently, there’s often an increase in doctor appointments and prescription drug costs. Spending tends to increase in this phase of retirement due to healthcare services and potentially long-term care.
The body starts to fail and you need to have all your affairs in order – you’re ready.
Financial Planning for the Three Distinct Periods
In a nutshell, your spending can be heavy during your vibrant period, then contract during your transition period, and could shoot up during your assisted period depending upon how much care you require.
Since your spending is reduced in your transition years, means that, within reason, you can spend more heavily in your vibrant years and go for the gusto while assuring there will be ample reserves to die with.
It’s key to properly plan for your finances for all three periods as to how aggressively you can make withdrawals from your retirement savings. There’s a gentle balance between financing a world class retirement during your vibrant period yet not running out of money during your assisted period.
Because you’ll start to slow down during your transition years, you’ll most likely still be living at home and only require a moderate amount of care, if any at all. Perhaps a visiting health care assistant and someone to do the cleaning and yard work.
But those multi-week world trips or that cross country trip in your RV become a thing of the past and funds are no longer required for such. Take the peddle off the metal and keep an appropriate cash reserve for the final phase.
Specific Financial Planning for the “Assisted Final Period”
The wild card is the Assisted Final Period. It’s unknown how severely your health will decline and for how long before you enter the pearly gates. It’s best to plan for the very worst.
Our last days on earth can be quite costly and we’ll need a sufficient balance in our retirement savings to pay for our portion of end of life.
Dying Isn’t Free
Adding it all up, to fund a terminal illness, hospice, burial, and estate settlement, you should have a minimum of $60,000 remaining in your savings when you check out. Your life partner will need the same, so you’ll need a minimum of $120,000 for both of you.
Special Accounting for Severe Dementia
If you’re fortunate enough to make it to your mid-eighties you would not like the Las Vegas odds of contracting Alzheimer’s. At age 85 about 50% of the population has Alzheimer’s — scary.
Medicare will only pay for up to 100 days of skilled nursing home care under limited circumstances. However, custodial long-term nursing home care is not covered.
The national average cost for nursing home care is about $86,000 a year.
The average life expectancy after diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is 8-10 years. If we assume the first couple of years the symptoms are mild enough not to require assisted living, one would have to budget for 6 years or $516,000 to get to end of life. And, Medicare’s 100 days of coverage won’t amount to a row of beans.
But it poses another financial challenge to have that much money in reserve for the possibility of (a) living that long and (b) actually contracting this expensive protracted disease.
In another post FitCommerce has written about keeping the value of your house in reserve so that in the event you have to provide Alzheimer’s long term care, you can reverse your mortgage to finance such without draining your retirement savings.
Extending the Vibrant and Transition Periods While Shrinking the Assisted Final Period
Wouldn’t it be great to be one of those “Blue Zone” residents, you know the ones that are working, playing with their great grandchildren, walking, gardening, and then one night they just die in their sleep. Score!
Although technically it can be possible, most Americans will progress through all 3 periods until the last day and probably die in an ICU.
The goal becomes to extend the vibrant period as long as possible, well into the eighties, perhaps even into the nineties. Easy enough said, but how?
What’s totally out of our control is our genetics, there is a FOXO3 gene that turns on the body’s defenses against disease and aging throughout a lifetime. Should you hit the lottery and have this gene, you could have a longer life in spite of your lifestyle.
Without the FOXO3 gene, you’re not doomed, it just means you have some work to do if you want to extend your vibrant years. There’s something called epigenetics that can be tweaked to extend both lifespan and healthspan even if you don’t have the longevity genes. We’ll offer 4 practices to help expand your vibrant years and minimize your assisted final years:
• Avoid carcinogens – the most insidious being smoking.
• Proper Nutrition
• Regular Exercise
• Bio Hacks
Proper Nutrition
If you read all the current literature on proper diet you will go slowly mad: carnivore diet vs. vegan, paleo diet, Atkins diet (remember that one), Mediterranean diet…the list goes on.
Putting weight loss aside for the moment, the current literature that appear to make the most sense from solely a healthy and longevity perspective is that your nutrition should have:
• A bias toward vegetables, the more varied, the better.
• A bias toward whole foods, if it comes in a box or a can, be suspicious. We don’t need chemical additives in our bodies.
• Fiber in the diet, and lots of it. So much is written about the microbiome on health and longevity.
• Limited protein. Yes, you’ve been told your entire life about the importance of protein, but too much of it will up regulate an enzyme called mTOR which promotes cells to grow but turns off their abilities for longevity and survival.
• Less dairy – in the book “The China Study”, researcher T. Colin Campbell makes a compelling argument for eliminating dairy from the diet and eat only a plant based whole foods diet – but we’ll save room for the occasional select cheeses.
Exercise
A great quote from the Dr. Kenneth Cooper is, “We do not stop exercising
because we grow old – we grow old because we stop exercising”. That pretty much sums it up.
Admittedly the way you exercise in your sixties will be different than the way you exercise in your eighties. But you should be exercising up to your very last day.
From a health viewpoint, exercise will stress your muscles and your cardiovascular system to make them robust. If you want to keep your independence as you age, you need not become frail, hence some form of strength training is necessary. In your sixties, you can easily use weights or strength machines in gyms.
In your nineties, you can still strength train but now perhaps using stretch bands of differing resistance.
As for cardio, when you first retire, you’re probably anxious to bike on those country roads. At 73, Arnold Schwarzenegger bikes most mornings. As you age, you’ll probably give up biking and begin walking, however, it’s important to walk at a brisk a pace as possible to keep that heart pumping.
Finally, most seniors forget to maintain flexibility, it will drop off as much as 60% if you don’t work at it. The best remedy is a regular yoga class, most gyms offer them and there are even good ones on YouTube.
If you’re over 55 and have never exercised, check out the “Silver Sneakers” program at your local Y or gym. They’re instructor lead, low impact classes. It’s a great way to add exercise to your older years. The fees are highly affordable and may even be covered under Medicare Part C.
Biohacking
From primordial times, living things have gone through periods of stress and then calm, including homo sapiens. It’s those times of stress that actually propelled our species evolutionarily forward. Science has shown that cells that are stressed go into survival and longevity mode. When there’s abundant food and comfort, cells don’t trigger survival mode but just keep on growing and dividing, the end result is a shorter life.
There’s a concept called “hormesis” which basically says a little bit of stress will make the organism stronger and more anti-fragile. Basically it’s “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. So, FitCommerce is offering a couple of biohacks to engender a hermetic response to improve healthspan and lifespan:
• Limited time eating
• Periodic Fasting
• Cold Therapy
• High Intensity Interval Training
High Intensity Interval Training
We’ve already addressed the value of exercising your entire life but HIIT as it’s called really stresses your body to get the hormetic response. The basic concept is about 30 seconds of all out exercise (pushups, burpees, jumping jacks, sprinting, and many others) followed by 30 seconds of rest/recovery, then repeat. There are hundreds of different protocols on YouTube, just pick your favorite ones and dot it.
Periodic Fasting
Our ancestral hunter/gatherer forefathers went through cycles of feast and famine. That’s what we’ve evolved to. In the modern era, we hardly ever go more than 4 hours without eating. No wonder obesity is so rampant. FitCommerce has written about the benefits of periodic fasting and the benefits to your body when you do fast. We would suggest a 3-4 day water only fast 4-5 times a year it’ll do wonders to boost your immunity and get that hormetic response in all your cells.
Restricted Time Eating
Perhaps supplementing your periodic fasting is a habit of restricted time eating. Our bloodstream was never meant to be bathed in glucose for 16 hours a day via three meals and two snacks 365 days a year. One easy way is a slight daily fast of limiting all your food intake to an 8 hour window that means your essentially fasting for 16 hours a day.
Impossible you say, not really, all you have to do is delay having your first meal until 11:00 am and finish your last meal by 7:00 pm – boom, done, you just fasted. We’re not even modifying what you choose to eat, just compress the time window by which you eat and it’ll do wonders.
Excessive glucose for prolonged periods of time causes a multitude of problems, you pancreas works overtime to neutralize it and that can lead to insulin resistance. Restricted time eating will go far to prevent insulin resistance. By the way, you may even drop a few pounds of body fat. The good news is that body fat lost during fasting typically doesn’t return as with fad diets, that’s because fasting doesn’t lower the metabolism rate that brings back the body fat when the fasting ends. Fat lost through fasting is generally gone forever.
Cold Therapy
Another hormetic response can be gained through cold therapy. Once again, if our cells are living in total climate control 24/7/365 they don’t induce survival mode. But, give them an occasional dose of cold water and they’ll trigger a survival response.
During summers, up north you could go for a swim in the ocean or cold stream without a wet suite of course. Barring that, regular cold showers will do the trick. Not a marathon, just turn the dial all the way cold for a 4-5 minute shower. If nothing else it’ll really wake you up.
Anecdotally, Katharine Hepburn practiced cold therapy through daily cold showers or cold swimming and swore by its health benefits. And, by the way, she lived to 96 — you go, girl.
Conclusion
Peace of mind in retirement comes from good planning and from having your eyes wide open to the most probable eventualities as you progress through all phases of your retirement. As of this date, there is no cure for aging, it’s not even considered a disease. Consequently, your vitality will decline with the ensuing years, but it doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze more juice out of life.
The task at hand is to expand our vitality period as long as we’re able and shrink the assisted period as much as in our control and otherwise live life fully.
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