October 30, 2024 — Legendary founder of Jazzercise recently turned 80-years-old and is a prime example of vibrancy and active living.  What is her success formula?  Well, exercise, sound nutrition, and walking, but mainly dancing every day.

She continues to teach classes and do choreography for her company, which has more than 2,000 locations worldwide, more than 55,000 customers in the US alone, and brought in $77 million worth of sales last year.

To give you insight into her company’s incredible sustainable success, we thought it appropriate to republish the original interview we conducted back in 2004 in its entirety. Enjoy.

September 10, 2004 Original Editor’s Note:

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you can appreciate that Jazzercise and its founder, performer/teacher/businesswoman, Judi Sheppard Misset, are a phenomenon in the fitness world. Having recently celebrated its 35th anniversary, Jazzercise is now a $67 Million per year mega company.

Always in motion, we caught up to the peripatetic Missett and her daughter, Shanna Missett Nelson, corporate Vice President and Jazzercise trainer, during a taping event at the Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence, Rhode Island. A thousand Jazzercise teachers and students were at hand with people attending from as far away as Japan.

A lot of people credit Curves for Women as having great insight into attracting deconditioned women to fitness, and deservedly so, but, Ms. Missett was a pioneer in this area 35 years ago, offering a means for couch potatoes to have fun while exercising and to motivate them to get up and move through the joy of dance. She even removed the mirrors to remove the body comparison game.

Ms. Missett is still the creative force behind the company and still teaches several classes a week to this very day. What follows are her insights into the past, present and future of Jazzercise and clues as to where fitness in general may be heading.

An Interview with Judi Sheppard Missett, Founder of Jazzercise

FitCommerce.com: You started Jazzercise 35 years ago in Chicago. As you think about that era, what happened to get you started in this business?

Judi Sheppard Missett: I was going to Northwestern University as a theater major and I was working professionally in the theater. I started dancing professionally when I was 14, so I was working to help my parents put me through school. The work was with a professional jazz dance company. I was both performing and teaching in their studio.

I was teaching those jazz classes as though the students were going on to become professional dancers.  I soon realized that a lot of them were not there for that reason, they were actually there to change their body size to get ready for a class reunion, or to just look better. This was particularly true of the women in the class.

They would come, take a couple of classes and then go on their merry way and I would never see them again.  That sort of bothered me. I wanted them to experience the joy of dance and the joy that comes through movement and that art form.

I got permission from the director to try a different approach.  I started turning people away from the mirrors, I made dance simple and fun, gave lots of positive reinforcement, and I became their mirror, as a dancer.

FC: What was the growth like in those early days?

JSM: In the first class I had 15 people, the second I had 30, and the next I had 60, and then the room wouldn’t hold anymore, then I realized I was on to something.

It was a great joy for me to teach because most of these people were not serious dancers, they were people that had some dance but they wanted to enjoy the experience that comes with that kind of movement. It was fun and I looked forward to doing it.

I only taught it once per week until we moved to Southern California. Then I decided to teach more often and perform less. Then my classes became very popular in the San Diego area and then I branched out and went North a little, then East a little, I began teaching so many classes, I had so many requests I couldn’t fulfill them all.

“I believe that life gives you lots of forks in the road, and there are always signs and messages, cues, that tell you what need to do next.”

I had to make a big decision, I believe that life gives you lots of forks in the road, and there are always signs, messages, and cues, that tell you what need to do next. What happened to me was that I was teaching so many classes that I lost my voice.  I was very thin from working out so much.  That was a sign to me to either cut back or train others.  I chose to train. And, here we sit some years later and have almost 6,000 instructors all over the world.

FC: In the early days, when they kept coming back, they were obviously getting something out of it.  Was it the results in their body or was it the joy the movement?

JSM: It was both. They achieved a certain level of fitness that they were able to maintain by coming to class. It was also the joy and the fun and the excitement that comes through excellent choreography which is very innovative, the variety in music, always offering new songs, always using cutting edge musical artists.

It gave people that combination of art and science. The art of dance and the science of exercise physiology. That’s something they don’t get in any other class, that’s what sets us apart from any health club or aerobics studio anywhere in the world.

FC: Can you talk about the creative process.  How you come up with fresh material five times a year?

JSM: We do about 85 variations.  Being a trained dancer, I started dancing when I was 2 ½ years old.  I also studied with some of the masters in the art form.  All of that just remains inside of me.  I call upon it every time I have to do a new choreography.

Creativity isn’t something that you force, you can’t just say, ‘O.K., every Monday from 9:00 to 3:00 I’m going to create’, it doesn’t happen like that.  It requires, of course discipline, when you get an idea, or you get music you have to work through and if it doesn’t work, you have to take it back to the drawing table and do it again until it does work.

I personally teach 5 classes a week. You cannot do the choreography and not teach. It keeps your finger on the pulse of what’s out there. It would be like a surgeon operating on your heart who never practices, who never actually does it.  I get feedback from students every time I teach. I’m also in other instructors classes all the time and watching.

It just comes into your body ; I’m choreographing almost every day of my life. I carry music with me and listen to it in the car.  I teach a class once a week that is up in the mountains 2 hours from where I live, I get a lot done during that drive.

“What our classes are all about is success.”

The record companies send me lots of promotional tapes all the time. I have a woman who does music research and development for me.  She’ll give me the songs which I’ll listen to and then I visualize: what does the song feel like, what is it telling me to do, what’s the feel of it, visualize movements, then I practice on them, I take them into class and I teach them. Sometimes they’re right on, and sometimes I have to tweak it a little bit.

“I visualize: what does the song feel like, what is it telling me to do, what’s the feel of it, visualize movements  then I practice on them, I take them into class and I teach them.”

FC: Shifting gears just for a moment to talk about the ‘company’. You started off all alone 35 years ago and now you’re got this $67 Million per year organization which is a large company, it must take a large organization to run all that?

JSM: I never planned it. It was never something that I said ‘Oh, I want to develop this big company’, it was out of love. It’s what I do for love. It’s passion. Personally, I don’t believe that I could have been successful if I hadn’t done something out of passion. You have love what you do, it has to be inside of you, it has to be in your heart and your soul.

It was for me from the beginning. As a professional performer, I always loved the theater and then the interesting thing is oftentimes you’re either a great performer or you’re a great teacher. I was blessed because I could do both pretty darn well, and I loved doing both.

“Money follows ideas, not the other way around”

You either love performing or you love teaching, but I really loved to do both. So, I could bring that element of performance into the teaching.  That’s why we were successful as a business. I never worried about the numbers, I never worried or thought about the money, I thought about ‘Will this be a great thing to do? will it be fun? Will it be good for the people who are my students, my customers? Will it be good for me? Then as the business evolved will it be good for our franchisees, our instructors?  Does it feel right and feel good?  If the answer is ‘yes,’ then we do it.

Money follows ideas, not the other way around.

FC: On the topic of physiology, was there a point where you felt you had to adapt your choreography to the human body to exercise certain muscle groups?

JSM: That’s what dance is.  You’re not a good professional dancer unless you know how to do precisely that. I did that from the beginning, it was like rolling off a log for me, not something I had to learn. When you dance, you have to use your whole body and you have to use it properly, you have to do it in the right alignment and you have to give yourself a lot of options for movement.

I was using Pilates 35 years ago because I was trained in it.  I was using low and high impact even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing because the phrase wasn’t coined yet.  I was using flexibility moves and strength moves, I was doing these because that’s what you do in a dance class.

FC: Over three and a half decades, you had to witness some cusps, the forks in the road as you call them; were there any major changes you can recall along that way where it was either music diverting, or exercise diverting, or perhaps both?

JSM: The music never diverts because we have the most wonderfully creative wonderfully talented musicians out there, and if you know where to go, you’re going to find those people.

We use their music in its original form, we don’t alter the music in any fashion, for instance forcing 98 beats per minute.

FC: I would imagine it makes the choreography, from a fitness point of view, slightly more challenging because you don’t blend in a pre-defined rhythm, is that true?

JSM: You never worry about beats. If you are a true chorographer, and you really understand how the body works, beats per minute mean nothing. There can be a song that has only 3 beats per minute and I can get your heart rate way up to where it needs to be.

It’s how you use the music to integrate the movement with the music. That’s difficult for people, who are used to the usual aerobic mentality, to understand. You would only understand if you have a background in the art of dance.

As far as the movements changing, as we learned more about what we’ve needed, I would adapt our class structure for that.  In the beginning they believed 15 minutes of aerobic workout was fine, then it went to 20 and then 30. As we learned more about fitness, I adapted that to what we needed to make sure everyone got the most efficient and effective workout.

As we learned more about weight training, I added more of that into the program because I thought it was important to keep us ahead of the game.

We also introduced programs for kids, active aging   adults, circuit training classes, use of balls, weights, tubes, and the Step.

In that respect, you have to change as you learn more about fitness trends. We hired people that were interested in doing these studies. I wanted to know what their results were and then integrate it into what we do.

FC: So, you have access to studies on certain exercise protocols and tapping into that and working it into your choreography?

JSM: Right.  And some studies we actually commission ourselves.

FC: How do you cater to different levels of students?

JSM: What our classes are all about is: success. We want someone to come into a class and feel successful right away, not feel intimidated, not feel like ‘Oh, I’m a big klutz, I shouldn’t be going back there’. I want them to walk in and feel successful.

You walk a fine line between making it challenging but not   so   challenging that the new person walking in the door would say “Wow, wait a minute, I can’t possibly do this, it’s too difficult’.

It’s a double-edged sword sometimes. We have a lot of veterans that have been around for 20-25 years and that’s a big feather in our cap because we have staying power.  On the other hand it can be a detriment in a way because people think we haven’t progressed.  They think ‘Oh, Jazzercise that’s that big splurge of a program that happened in the eighties’.

“Personally, I don’t believe that I could have been successful if I hadn’t done something out of passion. You have love what you do, it has to be inside of you, it has to be in your heart and your soul.”

FC: Is it difficult to strike a balance between the original recipe that got you here and modifying it for the times?

Yes, it’s true, we experienced great periods of growth in the eighties, but we’re still here in 2004. If we hadn’t done what we do well, we wouldn’t still be here.  If we hadn’t changed, we wouldn’t still be here.  Yes, it’s the same program in name, but we always keep up with the times, we’re very cutting edge.

Longevity is great because you have staying power, but on the other hand sometimes people forget that in order to have staying power, you have to be excellent every day of your life.

FC: As a business woman, were there any many major business challenges over 3 ½ decades?  Any stressful moments?

JSM: Yes, there’s always challenges, you always have peaks and valleys. I’m happy to say that we’ve pretty much always have been a profitable company, certainly some years were better than others, that’s what corporations go through.

There have been challenges about how to move into the next transitional stage. The thing that is so fortunate that I have is fabulous people around me. You cannot run a company, you cannot do great things, without a great team and I really have one.  I have wonderful people.

When I speak at business seminars, I say one of the most important things you can do as a business owner is to surround yourself with people who lift you up. If you do that, there’s not telling where you’re going to be lifted.

The team has kept us going through those valleys, kept us moving forward, and on to the next level.  These last few years have been the best years we’ve ever had as a company.

FC: Do you specifically target a particular audience? Is there a specific demographic profile that you’re going after instead of too wide of a spectrum, all things to all people?

JSM: Yes, if you look at our demographics, they’re age 28 to 55. That’s our core. But, that doesn’t mean we don’t have older and younger.

Our two programs that we really are pushing are the junior program for the kids and the   Lite   program for the active aging adult. Because we have a lot of people, all the baby boomers coming into that phase. They want to stay active and healthy, but yet might not be able to do exercise quite as strenuously as they used to, the Lite program really addresses that.

We have this terrible childhood obesity problem in this country, so my whole effort is to target kids and tell them, ‘You know what? Fitness can be fun, it doesn’t have to be a drag”.  If they learn that it can be fun while they’re young, then it will be fun all their lives. It’s a natural thing to dance and to exercise.

FC: There are couple of other movements going on that are very popular, Pilates, which you’ve already mentioned, and perhaps yoga.  They seem to be kinder, gentler type movements that the boomers seem to be gravitating to. Is that a threat to your market share?

JSM: No, it’s not a threat at all. Jazzercise is really a fusion of all those things. I’ve always incorporated Pilates moves. A lot of yoga movements are the basis for jazz dance technique.  So, I had a lot of training in that.  I just naturally integrated it into what I do.

They’re a nice coupling with what we do.  You do need to work aerobically and we offer that.  In this time and age, so many people are looking for things that will just take an hour of their time where they can get it all, and they can do that with Jazzercise.

If they want to come to our classes 2-3 times a week and go to yoga a couple of times per week, that’s fine, we always recommend cross training to all of our students.

I was fortunate to study with one of Joseph’s Pilates protégés when I went to Northwestern I got a lot of good background that way.

FC: In the U.S., are there a lot of health clubs that are franchised with Jazzercise?

JSM: No, not many at all.

Our competition is not with health clubs but with the ‘couch’. These people probably wouldn’t be working out unless they were coming to Jazzercise because it’s a comfortable environment and they feel secure.  You’ll see every shape of body from the elite to those that are significantly overweight in the same class having a good time.  There are no mirrors, so nobody is comparing themselves to others.

FC:  As you peer into the future of Jazzercise, say the next half decade, what are you anticipating?

JSM: I have 2 books to write for the future. As far as the Jazzercise program goes, it’ll be more of the same, focusing on that older crowd and the kids. The boomers will be aging and more will be coming in.  We’ll continue to really implement the Lite program as an alternative even for people who have been doing regular Jazzercise and now need something just a little gentler.

And the kids thing is an important aspect of what we do.

We have some other ideas that we may involve ourselves with as far as getting even younger children involved.  The current Kids program is really targeted to kids age 5 and older. We may be working with younger kids and brand-new moms and that kind of thing.

I’m always open to change.  I love to change, I love to take risks; I love to try new things, who knows what’s going to be coming. If I see something that feels right to me and creates winning situations for everybody involved, I’m going to do it.  And oftentimes I’ve done it against the advice of some of the people around me, but I was right and they were wrong. And sometimes they’re right and I’m wrong, that’s the fun of life. What is life if you can’t experience those things.

FC: Are you testing these concepts, do you put it out to an audience, perhaps in one of your own clubs to see if it’s going in the right direction?

JSM: Sometimes.  Shana and I both travel a lot, we’re out in the field all the time. We hear comments, we listen, we talk, we go and teach regular classes. You really get a lot of good information just doing that.

You have to listen, you have to be aware of the signs, the messages and the cues.  And then you have to be open to what they’re telling you. Sometimes you may not like what you hear, but other times you do.

FC: What do you do in your spare time?

JSM: I don’t have much spare time, and it’s O.K. because I love what I do. Sometimes I almost feel guilty because I’m having so much fun with what I do.  Coming here to Providence, seeing everybody, getting on the plane was fun. No this isn’t work, it’s fun.

 

 

You just had a productive week at work and want to treat yourself to a wonderful weekend of sightseeing, shopping and great food, what could be better than going to Mystic Connecticut. You don’t want to drive in the heavy holiday traffic so you book your fare on Amtrak with the destination being the Mystic Depot Train Station.

Next step, you’re going to need wheels when you get there, so you pick up your smartphone and log onto the Turo app and select and book your car, square away payment, and get a confirmation.

You board the train and you’re on your way, while in transit, the owner of your selected car messages you as to the car’s parked location adjacent to the train station, and what the combination is to the key lockbox.

The train arrives in Mystic, you step off the train and step onto your rental car and go on to have a wonderful weekend, easy peasy.  There is no waiting in line and dealing with a rental clerk.

When the rental period is over, the car is returned to the approximate parking area and you step on the train for your ride home.

Welcome to Host-Based Car Renting

This is not fiction; it is now available at the Mystic Train Depot as well as at airports and train stations across the country.

As Austin S. visiting Mystic from LA describes, “It’s so easy grabbing the car from the train station and having the advantage of the lockbox.”

  A Blend of Uber and Airbnb

The company that makes this all possible is Turo (www.turo.com). Think of it as the Airbnb of cars. Airbnb does not own any houses but is the market maker between thousands of homeowners and renters. Similarly, Turo is the market maker between car owners and renters that want a new, non-commercial, no hassle experience when renting a car.

Uber’s ridesharing success relies on the power of its phone app and location, and payment capabilities as does Turo. In contrast to Uber who provides a driver with each car rental, with Turo you are the driver and have use of the car during your entire stay for all that spontaneity.

Turo maintains stringent requirements as to the age, mileage and condition of the cars offered on their site. Periodic inspections are mandatory by qualified mechanics to assure safety. Any cars that don’t meet the grade are blocked from the site.

Each listed car on the site has full feature descriptions as well as up to twenty photos of the car both interior and exterior so there are no surprises.

 Hosts That Care About Their Cars and Their Reputation

As with Amazon, Airbnb and now Turo, it’s the ability of customers to post reviews about their experience good or bad. There is a 5-star ranking system that makes it easy to spot the top performers from the mediocre. This ranking system is what keeps the gig economy honest.

Turo car owners, referred to as hosts, are fastidious about their reputation and keep their cars in immaculate condition, and bend over backwards to satisfy the renters.

When car rental shopping, customers can read the reviews posted by previous renters about each host before making a final selection.

A New Way To Rent a Car

If the legacy car rental agencies are not fearful now, they should be. With Turo the customer doesn’t just deal with an employee that is forced to enforce certain rental rules meant to upgrade and add  income to each deal, but interacts with the owner of the car directly and of his or her business success.  It makes for a totally more personalized experience.

So, spread the word, if you, your family or friends are travelling to Mystic and need a car rental, just launch the Turo app on your phone and book it in minutes.

 

 

 

By Al Valente

The next time someone calls you a “Neanderthal”, don’t get upset because it just may be true – well, in part that is..

It turns out that if your ancestral lineage is from Europe then you most probably possess 1% to 2% Neanderthal genes.  If you’re of Asian ancestral decent then, similarly, you have 1% to 5% of a different extinct hominin called “Denisovan”.

The reason we now know all this is attributed to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Pääbo laboriously determined how to extract and analyze DNA from 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones. His decades of research have made it possible for scientists to begin probing differences between today’s modern humans and our ancient ancestors like Neanderthals and Denisovans.

  The 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine

This year’s 2022 noble prize in medicine was recently awarded to Dr. Pääbo for his creative work in isolating the Neanderthal genome from bone fragments found in Germany.

It was no small feat because such fragments are polluted with genes of microorganisms and the such, but Pääbo developed the means to isolate the actual Neanderthal mitochondria genes (mtDNA) in fragments and splice them together to ultimately sequence the entire genome.

His work went on to discover a previously unknown extinct hominin species when he extracted genes from a finger bone from the Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, the site that gave name to “Denisovans”

His work ultimately led to the initial sequencing of the Neanderthal genome about 10 years ago. With that, he could compare those unique Neanderthal genes that are now found in modern day humans which is roughly 1% to 2%.

We Were Not Alone

Currently, we Homo sapiens are the ultimate apex predictors on this planet, the king of the hill over all other species. But it wasn’t always this way, hundreds of thousands of years ago there were other hominins wandering major parts of earth. Two of interest were the Neanderthals and Denisovans who were erect bipeds, similar but not quite like us. They have both been extinct for about 30,000 years.

About 400,000 years ago Neanderthal species formed in the middle East and then migrated to what is now Europe. It wasn’t until about 70,000 years ago that Sapiens then migrated to Europe.

Hanky Panky among the Hominins

It turns out that the physical appearance between Sapiens and Neanderthals or Denisovans was close enough for them to interbreed. They coexisted for tens of thousands of years before the Neanderthals mysteriously died off. It was that interbreeding which imbedded extinct hominin genes into our modern-day DNA.

Your Odds of Having Ancient Hominin Genes

Although all that intermingling was tens of thousands of years ago, there remains a trace of ancient hominin genes in modern humans. If your ancestry is entirely from Africa then you are most likely fully Homo Sapien. If your ancestry is from Europe, you most likely have between 1% and 2% Neanderthal genes. If your ancestry is from Asia, you could have anywhere from 1% to 6% Denisovan genes.

O.K., How Does All This Affect Us?

Although a small percentage of our genes are comprised of ancient hominin genes, scientists believe it has subtly affected us. Genetic variants seem to have persisted within those intermingled groups primarily because they offered a survival advantage to people facing certain harsh environments and pathogens.

There were other adaptive advantages, for example Asians with the Denisovan genes are believed to be able to tolerate high altitudes which could explain the thriving populations in mountainous Tibet.

Unfortunately, there are some negative consequences. There is a correlation between having Neanderthal genes and premature births. But on the flip side, those same genes tend to have less miscarriages.

Those of us that suffer from severe allergies and credit some of that to the Neanderthal genes.

Enhanced Immunity

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute report about the discoveries in 2 independent studies confer the important role of past interspecies relations in human evolution and specifically in the evolution of the innate immune system, which serves as the body’s first line of defense against infection.

Newer studies highlight the functional importance of this inheritance on Toll-like receptor genes. These genes are expressed on the cell surface, where they detect and respond to components of bacteria, fungi, and parasites. These immune receptors are essential for eliciting inflammatory and anti-microbial responses and for activating an adaptive immune response.

If you think about it, the Neanderthals inhabited the western Eurasia for a good 200,000 years before Sapiens arrived. That was a good head start to develop immunity to indigenous bacteria, viruses and fungi some of that immunity ultimately got passed on to us.

Covid May be More Problematic

Paradoxically, although it is believed that the Neanderthal gene strengthens or immune system, sadly, humans with a specific Neanderthal gene variant that do catch Covid have been found to require extended hospitalization and ventilation treatment.

The DNA strand is found on chromosome 3, and a team of researchers in Europe has linked certain variations in this sequence with the risk of being more severely ill with Covid-19.

The Takeaway

What can you do about knowing you’re part Neanderthal? Not much really, you can’t change your genes especially that tiny portion of ancient genes you inherited.  But you at least you can be aware of certain predispositions to Covid and take appropriate actions to play it safe.

Related Posts:

Live and Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer for Optimal Health

By Al Valente

Table of Contents

Biological Age Differs from Chronological Age

What determines your Biological Age

You are not Limited by Your Genes

Control Your Epigenetics and You Control Your Life

A Focus on DNA Methylation

Augment Your Nutrition for Optimal DNA Methylation

The Magnificent 14 Foods to Foster Proper DNA Methylation

It’s a moral question… as to whether we should even desire to live forever.  And, if you’ve ever seen a 100-year-old, chances are you wouldn’t aspire to be in their physical shape. It begs the question…why even try to life longer if you’re going to be steadily decrepit?

Luckily, there’s a concept called morbidity compression. What it basically means is that, if unchecked, the elderly could face many months, perhaps years of age-related disease; often in nursing homes. Sometimes it’s lonely and painful. Wouldn’t it be great to compress that illness time to weeks or even days, and live a robust life right up to that point? That should be our mission, not living longer for the sake of living longer, but compressing morbidity.

Biological Age Differs from Chronological Age

It’s impossible to turn back your actual years, that’s immutable. But there is a concept called “biological age” (science calls it Horvath Clock DNAmAge) and many studies have shown that it can be turned back. No, not with hocus pocus, but with fairly simple adjustments to lifestyle and diet.  A recent study by Dr. Kara Fitzgerald had a pilot group turn back their biological clock, on average, by 3.25 years which we’ll discuss here. In other words, regardless of their calendar age, their biological age, and the increased vigor that goes with it,  was 3.25 years younger.

What determines your Biological Age?

Although we humans are programmed from birth to die, on average, somewhere in our late seventies. That’s chronological age, but it’s now shown you can slow down and even reverse biological age.

The 3 top level components of natural aging are:

• • Genetics
  • Epigenetics
  • DNA Methylation

(DNA methylation is actually a subcomponent of epigenetics but lately deserves its own focus)

You are not Limited by Your Genes

Your genes are your DNA. You got half your DNA from your father and the other half from your mother and, other than some minor flukes along the way, your DNA is fixed from birth to death.

There’s not a lot of dials to turn here. But the good news is that genetics really only represents 25%-30% of your probably lifespan, the rest is clearly up to you in how you conduct your lifestyle.

There is a growing field of gene editing using CRISPR CAS9 to edit certain genes, right now that’s pretty much in the future and there’s not a whole lot you can do to turn back your biological clock by manipulating it.

Control Your Epigenetics and You Control Your Life

Epigenetics is a variable that one can manipulate to slow down aging.

Your DNA may be fixed, but the expression of certain genes is heavily affected by certain conditions that cause the expression to go haywire. We know this because you can take two identical twins born with exactly the same DNA but they could be susceptible  to different diseases and age differently, genetics can’t explain that .

Remember the Watson-Crick double helix of your DNA?  That very same coding of thousands of genes reside in each and every cell of your body. There are sections of your genes that make eye tissue and others that make liver tissue and so on. But sometimes there’s interference and genes are turned off that should be on and vice versa.  That’s caused by epigenetic noise. Something is getting in the way. And, unfortunately, that noise progressively increases as we get older.

Scientists have observed several ways that the proper gene expression is interrupted such as loose histone packing (more on this in a future post) and erroneous DNA methylation which we’ll cover here.

A Focus on DNA Methylation

DNA methylation is proving to be an upcoming means of dramatically affecting biological age. Without sufficient methyl’s your genes will not express themselves properly. The methyls attach themselves to your DNA strands and instruct proper genes to turn on and other genes to be suppressed. For example, in your eyes, you wouldn’t want your eye cells to have a liver gene turned on and your eye genes suppressed. That would cause rapid deterioration. That’s what happens when accurate DNA methylation is impaired.

How to Improve DNA Methylation

Luckily there are ways to improve your DNA methylation and turn back your biological clock and it doesn’t require surgery or expensive medication for that matter. Just some simple changes to your lifestyle and nutrition will do the trick.

Exercise

Exercise is often referred to as the “fountain of youth” and rightfully so. In addition to all the health benefits that are too numerous to mention here, exercise greatly enhances DNA methylation.

If you’re already exercising, keep it up, if not, start a regular sustainable program. It need not be overly strenuous like running 10 miles a day or bench pressing 300 lbs.  Just a half hour of vigorous exercise daily will suffice.

Sleep

Lack of sleep is the one of the greatest aging elements. You need sufficient sleep each night to allow DNA methylation to properly take place. Shoot for a minimum of 7 hours per night, 8 hours is even better

Stress Management

In addition to sleep, managing your stress is the second greatest aging element that affects your DNA methylation. There are numerous self-help ways to adopt the right attitude and not allow life’s natural “curve balls” drive up your blood pressure.

At minimum, budget 20 minutes each morning before your “monkey mind” takes over to meditate. Again, there are numerous techniques available out there, just adopt the one that works best for you, and do it. Your life will be so much better on many fronts – and by the way, you’ll turn back your biological clock.

Augment Your Nutrition for Optimal DNA Methylation

If there are not sufficient methyl groups available in your body, you cannot have optimal DNA methylation. We now know there are certain nutrients that will bath your body with the sufficiency of methyl groups to keep your DNA methylation humming along.

Here are a handful that science has identified

1. 1. Folate — also known as vitamin B9, is a water-soluble vitamin, it’s best known to promotes proper fetal growth and development to reduce the risk of birth defects. It is found naturally in many plants, as well as in the form of synthetic “folic acid” in fortified foods.
   2. Vitamin B12 — also known as cyanocobalamin or cobalamin, is water-soluble, supports adrenal function and is very important for DNA synthesis.
   3. Betaine — Betaine is also called as trimethylglycine, it produces carnitine, which promotes liver function and cellular reproduction as well as metabolism of the amino acid homocysteine.
   4. Choline — Found in virtually all living cells, in the brain it is a vital neurotransmitter responsible for memory, muscle control and mood and plays a vital role in regulating gene expression.
   5. Cysteine – an amino acid that in addition to being a methyl doner, it helps create anti-oxidants in the body.

To get these 5 vital methyl doners into your diet, don’t be as concerned with proportions, just generously add the following foods to your weekly die

The Magnificent 14 Foods to Foster Proper DNA Methylation:

1. 1. Spinach
   2. Swiss Chard
   3. Beef Liver
   4. Beets
   5. Eggs with yolk
   6. Pumpkin seeds
   7. Mushrooms
   8. Avocado
   9. Berries
   10. Green Tea
   11. Salmon
   12. Herring
   13. Flax Seed
   14. Oysters

Conclusion

Your chronological age is indelible and totally out of your control. But regardless of your age you can take these actions beginning today to wind back your biological age.

Related Posts:

The Promise of Successful Aging — An Interview with Superstar Dermatologist/Nutritionist Dr. Nicolas Perricone

3 Anti-Aging Biohacks for Life Extension

The Concern

Johns Hopkins Medicine estimates 7% -12% of Americans age 65 to 74 are considered “frail” and increases to 25% for those older than age 84. Frailty increases both the incidences of disease and injuries which result in complications leading to longer hospital stays. The biggest transgression is that frailty robs you of independence and quality of life and can lead to forced assisted living.

Frailty is a clinical syndrome meeting 3 of 5 phenotypic criteria:

1. weakness
2. slowness
3. low level of physical activity
4. self-reported exhaustion
5. unintentional weight gain.

How Frailty Happen?

Frailty is preceded by a natural muscle deterioration phenomenon called “sarcopenia”,  a condition where, beginning in your forties, you will lose about 1% of your muscle mass per year and anywhere from 1% to 3% of your strength per year. Tick, tick, tick…accumulating with each passing year. All people are subject to sarcopenia, but not all need to become frail.

Counteracting Sarcopenia

You can counteract the loss of muscle by adding more muscle. The muscle added hopefully equates to the natural loss, but even if it’s not quite equal at least you’ll stave off frailty. You can add muscle even in your seventies. People in their eighties can’t necessarily add a lot more muscle mass but they can definitely add muscle strength to enhance the quality of their movement and balance.

Exercise and Nutrition to Reduce Odds of Frailty?

You need to add strength training to your exercise mix. Resistance training of the major muscle groups via weights, machines, bands, or even just body weight twice a week will mitigate sarcopenia.

You also need to add protein to your nutrition program. According to Stuart Phillips, Ph D., of McMaster University, the optimal protein intake is 1.2 grams per Kilogram. So, for a person weighing 150 lbs. that would equal 82 grams of protein required per day. If possible, ingest more of the essential fatty acid Leucine which kick starts your muscle building biology. Leucine is found in salmon, beef, eggs, chickpeas, and soybeans.

An Added Bonus from Certain Foods

A recent 3.5-year study out of Spain of people over 65 years of age found that there was a correlation between specific lack of vitamin intake and becoming frail. Lacking vitamin B6 led to a 2.8 times probability of becoming frail!  To a lesser degree ingesting vitamins E and C also mitigate becoming frail.

Vitamin B6 is found in beef liver, chicken, chickpeas, salmon and sweet potatoes.

Vitamin E is best found in: almonds and sunflower seeds.

Vitamin C is found in: blueberries, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, Kale, lemons, red pepper and Swiss Chard.

Conclusion

Left unchecked natural aging leads to sarcopenia will then can lead to later life frailty. It can be forestalled with strength training, quality protein and key vitamins.   A regular program of such will foster a zestful life in later years. Studies have shown maintaining a higher level of muscle mass will lead to a 30% decrease in mortality risk. Are you motivated yet?

 

By Al Valente

You’re Retired – Congratulations.  You’ve probably made a lot of changes in your life from your “working years”. Yes, you now have more freedom in your day to do the things you most enjoy. But most paramount is living on other sources of income instead of that steady salary – a rather significant shift in mentality.

Table of Contents:

Larger Equity Means Larger Cash Returns

Remember: Your Portfolio Will Keep Living Even After You Die

Be Cautious with Growth Stocks

Dividend Stocks are Lower Risk Investments

Find Free Money with Covered (Out-of-the Money) Calls

Although a small portion of readers will have both a pension and social security, the vast majority will have social security and an annual drawdown from retirement savings. So not to run out of money in 20 years, the natural response is to run tighter living cost controls and become very conservative with your retirement investments. And that makes perfect sense.

However, retirement doesn’t mean the end to actually growing your portfolio. Yes, you will die one day, but your portfolio can keep on living and growing. Your surviving partner and heirs will be the ultimate beneficiaries. Here are a couple of approaches.

Larger Equity Means Larger Cash Returns

During your working years, you started with nothing in your retirement savings account then kept adding to it over the years. By the time you did retire it was a goodly amount, perhaps north of $1 million.

Simple math: if you made an 8% annual return on your first $100,000 that equals $8,000, nice. But fast forward to retirement where you may have amassed $1,000,000 That same 8% now adds $80,000. A rather nice piece of change.

So, yes, if you can live off your other recurring revenue such as social security, pension, part-time job or side hustle, the equity gains in your retirement account adds to your overall wealth and keep on compounding.

You Need to be Conservative

Our risk tolerance changes as we age. Remember how fast you used to drive your car in your youth compared to now?  Similarly, you probably took more chances on buying stocks that were long shots and just never panned out. No problem, you had a lot more years to work and make it up.

Now that you’re in your later years, you just don’t have too many years ahead of you can’t afford to screw up on a risky long shot, so you become more conservative in your investing which is a good thing. It forced you to behave as you probably should have done decades ago.

Remember: Your Portfolio Will Keep Living Even After You Die

Somehow, we attach ourselves to the mentality that our portfolio dies with us, and consequently we become overly conservative and adopt the attitude that we’ll transfer more growth investments to conservative investments like cash. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and does indeed decline.

With the inflation we’re facing today, that decline is worse since the buying power of the dollar diminishes and further erodes your wealth.

But what if we adopt the attitude that our portfolio can live on and on? It will live after you die, after your life’s partner dies and rolls down to your heirs.

This is a totally different way to act. With the proviso that an apportionment of your savings nest egg is in safety and can withstand a major stock market corrections and/or economic downturn, another apportionment can be invested in intelligent growth.

Intelligent Ways to Keep Your Portfolio Growing in Retirement Without Losing Your Shirt

OK, so you buy into the concept of growing your retirement portfolio even in your later years, but are averse to risk, don’t want to be heavily weighted in stocks. Here are a couple of ideas.

Be Cautious with Growth Stocks

Early-stage growth stocks like high-tech companies, typically run at a loss for years until their “story” show promise. It is best to stay away from these. When there’s a major correction, they’re the first to be sold off. But if you’re convinced you’ve done your research and have a growth stock with upside potential, then only allocate a small portion of your portfolio to such, say less than 10%, much less.

However, there are tried and true high-tech stocks that are cash flow positive and some even pay a dividend. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook come to mind. These are safer bets and over a 5-year period will most likely appreciate in value.

Dividend Stocks are Lower Risk Investments

Regardless of the vertical they’re in, dividend stocks are the stocks that are boring. But they’ve been paying a dividend for decades. Even if the stock prices stay flat, each quarter, you’ll get a cash deposit. Depending upon the dividend yield it creates a nice floor as to how far the stock could decline during a market downturn.

As of this writing a handful of Dow stocks with decent dividends: IBM (5.22%), 3M (4.16%), Walgreens (4.02%), and DOW (4.76%).  This is after 2 years of coronavirus which battered down both Boeing and Disney who do not pay a dividend this year. But that will change in the years ahead.

Dividend stocks are the ones that actually increase in value when investors panic that their not-yet-profitable growth stocks and getting slammed and need to flight to safety. They move money to these safe havens where you will already be

Find Free Money with Covered (Out-of-the Money) Calls

Trading options is very risky and have no place in a retirement portfolio, hear us now! But there is one exception – selling out-of-the-money covered calls. “Out-of-the-money” means that the stock today is  trading less than a future “strike price” a buyer is willing to pay.

Let’s say, you own a “mature growth stock”, called XYZ, that today is trading at $100 per share. And, let’s say that you check the trading of a $110 call that matures 2 months out and a buyer is willing to pay $5 per share for that right to purchase your shares at $110.  That buyer obviously feels that 2 months from now, XYZ will be trading above  $115 and is willing to pay $5 per share for that right.

Even if you absolutely love your XYZ stock, you feel the odds of it piercing the $110 price within 2 months is a long shot, you should sell that call and pocket the $5 per share.  Should XYZ reach or surpass the $110 a share you’ll have to sell at the $110 strike price. Not bad, you made $10 a share on the rise and you also pocketed the $5 per share call. You won!

Call buyers have a gambler’s mind set. They purchase a number of different calls knowing that most will be worthless, but there will be those one or two that bring huge returns for them.  Selling to their speculation is how you can add an entirely new income stream to your portfolio without downside risk. In fact, the only risk you have is an “opportunity risk” whereby the calls you sold exceeded the strike price by a large margin and you missed a larger profit opportunity. But it’s not something you’ll ever lose sleep over.

Doubling Down

Nirvana is owning blue chip stocks that have a high dividend yield and you sell “out-of-the-money” calls against them. No matter which way the stock market moves, you’ll be far better off then betting on the vicissitudes of speculative stocks.

Now Go Forth and Multiply…

..your wealth that is. Just a couple of semi-passive tweaks can keep your nest egg growing even now that you’re retired.

Related Posts:

Flipping the Switch — When to Start Spending Your Retirement Savings — Guilt Free

Don’t Outlive your Money in Retirement

When to Start Taking Social Security Payments – It’s not When you Think

 

By Al Valente

Key Takeaways

• Our modern-day diets go totally contrary to how our digestive systems evolved.
• Insulin is a powerful hormone whose overproduction leads to metabolic syndrome, obesity and diabetes.
• Insulin is spiked by sugar, high glycemic carbohydrates, but not fats.
• Sugar may very well be the worst food discovery we could have made.
• Short periods of starvation are actually healthy for us.
• Most people today are deficient in fiber.
• Weight training with quality protein is necessary to stave off sarcopenia.
• Automation led to sedentary lifestyles which is taking a toll on our general health.

First and foremost, this is not an article espousing the benefits of the paleo or ketogenic diet. There is so much pontificating on these and other diets for optimal health: Mediterranean Diet, Dash Diet, etc. And, many conflict with one another: high fat diet vs. high carb vs. vegetarian and so on.

But one thing remains true…all of it has to be analyzed in the context of evolutionary biology. Our human bodies were born in our caveman days and our digestive system adapted over the eons to a consistent hunter-gatherer’s diet then suddenly, bam! Within a mere hundred years we were cast into modern society where our modern-day diet is totally out of synch with our adaptive digestive system.

Scientists agree that the first organisms appeared on planet earth around 3.8 billion years ago and through millions of mutations and natural selection a myriad of species appeared and died off, but the survival of the fittest machinery kept churning.

Then about 6 million years ago a creature appeared that would be the first branch of the various humanoids. Then about 200,000 years ago, one of those branches became us – homo sapiens.

What’s absolutely key here is that our bodies evolved over 3.8 billion years to adapt to what we were able forage for, or animals that we could hunt. We were coined “hunter-gatherers”. We were enviable species, tall and lean with perhaps 6% body fat (compared to today’s average of 10%-20%).

Man Became Intelligent, then it Worked Against Us

All that time on earth allowed our hunter-gatherers ancestors to grow huge brains. This gave us higher intelligence to invent tools. And, along the way we figured out how to grow plants domestically so we didn’t have to go foraging every day.

Learning to grow crops allowed us to also grow our population and live in dense communities. But our nutritional system took a major hit. Most farmers grew what would grow abundantly, mostly single crops (think potatoes in Ireland). They really didn’t understand or were even aware of the nutritional diversity our bodies required.

From his book: The Story of the Human Body, Harvard’s Daniel Lieberman has said that the conversion to farming from hunter-gathering led to higher mortality rates in general and people started dying younger and becoming shorter. “So, farming really was initially a very bad thing for the human body in terms of longevity and nutrition and health”.

Loss of Nutritional Diversity

Hunter-gatherers were used to a very diverse diet; they ate whatever they could find or kill and it varied from season to season.

In contrast, farmers don’t grow for diversity; they grow single crops that provide great yields and good market price and this practice took a toll on homo sapiens’ health.

According to Lieberman, “Humans paid a heavy biological cost for agriculture, especially when it came to the variety of nutrients. Even now, about 60% of our calories come from corn, rice and wheat. Learning to grow wheat was a bad idea. That’s because we removed the bran and milled it to a fine white flour which leads to a myriad of high glycemic foods that raising havoc with our insulin levels”.

Later, the discovery of sugar was even a worse idea than that of wheat. From the early 1800’s when we first started consuming sugar, we ate about 4 lbs. per year; we consume about 100 lbs. per year today.

We simply don’t have the bodies that are able to cope with those high levels of sugar. And the result is that we get sick, often with metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes and/or fatty liver disease

Learn more about sugar’s effect on our health:

Sugar – The Worst Discovery for Our Health

Then We Decided When and How Often to Eat

Probably out of convenience because we went out into the fields or factories, or other workplaces, we found it convenient to eat 3 meals a day.  Worse, in modern era, we decided we should snack in-between meals and bedtime to keep our energy level up.  Nothing could have been worse.

Hunter-gatherers probably ate only once or twice a day and often went without eating for extended periods of time. That’s what our modern-day bodies evolved to expect: feast/famine cycles. But instead, today from cradle to grave we eat every 3-4 hours of our waking day and tax our digestive system and keep our insulin level constantly elevated. This is a major contributor to metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.

Governments Did Their Best, But Failed

Seventy years ago, with rising obesity, coronary heart disease, and diabetes, the U.S. government had to step in and try and do something.  In 1992, wrongly believing fat was the culprit to all of our obesity and chronic diseases, the U.S. Department of Agriculture came up with the “food pyramid” which placed a heavy emphasis to consume more carbohydrates and less fat.

It was dead wrong and fraught with food industry lobbyists influences. The pyramid promoted eating hearty servings of carbohydrates and minimizing fats. In fact, the largest segment was that of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta, the high glycemic foods that led to rampant obesity.

The Hunter-Gatherers Diet

Homo Sapiens after millions of years of evolution and just prior to taking to farming bodily systems were in harmony with what they were eating and hence were tall lean athletes.

According to Lieberman, “How much meat they ate is conjecture, but meat constitutes approximately 1/3 of the diet among hunter-gatherers in the tropics (more fish and meat are consumed in the temperate habitats)”.

“This would make sense because eating a chunk of antelope steak yields five times more energy than an equal amounts of carrots as well as receiving essential proteins and fats”.

How to Merge Our Intelligence with our Evolution

Hunter-gatherers didn’t know squat about science, clinical trials, macronutrient ratios, vitamins, etc. They just went out and foraged and hunted. They ate and brought back to the clan what was available out there.

We pointed out that our intelligence gave us the ability to farm but brought with it a mismatch of macronutrient proportions and a lack of necessary nutritional diversity. Our intelligence also freed us up from hard labor leading to a sedentary lifestyle which raised further havoc on our good health.

Once we understand how and why our body’s systems work due to evolution we can use science to hack the system for optimal health.

Knowledge is Power – Understanding How Our Systems Respond to Food

Understanding how to manage insulin

Insulin is a powerful hormone that detects glucose in our bloodstream and instructs our cells to open up and ingest it. But when there is too much sugar in our system it then instructs our bodies to store it as body fat.

The trick is to watch the glycemic index of the foods you’re eating. On the glycemic scale of 1-100, the higher the number the larger the spike in insulin. Pure glucose has a glycemic index of 100.

Sugar is a Toxin

Hunter-gatherers didn’t eat sugar except for occasional honey and neither should you, it’s toxic to your system. What’s worse is that it hidden in those prepared foods you buy. It doesn’t matter if it’s table sugar or high fructose corn syrup, stay away from it.

The biggest spike in sugar comes in liquid form.  A 12-ouce can of soda can hold as much as 9 teaspoons of sugar…yikes! It shoots straight into your bloodstream and super elevates your insulin levels which is trying to neutralize it.

Think fruit juice is the healthy alternative, think again. Yes, soda is loaded with sugar which is 50% glucose and 50% fructose, but fruit juices are heavily laden with fructose which can only be processed by the liver. Too much of it can lead to fatty liver disease. Understand this, fruit juice is junk food!

Should we Throw Out the Low-Fat Diet Entirely?

Ironically the obesity epidemic began because fats got a bad rap. Maybe because a gram of fat has twice the calories as a gram of carbohydrates. But fat does not spike insulin. Then there is the whole debate of saturated fats being bad for you but the scientific evidence is not backing this up.

Our hunter-gatherers’ bodies were accustomed to eating fat. Until today’s saturated fat debate is finally settled, it would be best to eat monounsaturated fats like avocados and olives and olive oil to be on the safe side.

Quality Meats and Strength Training

Vegetables are extremely healthy for us, they’re loaded with polyphenols, vitamins, minerals and fiber and most are low on the glycemic scale. The question becomes can you achieve optimal health solely with a vegetarian or vegan debate.  That debate continues to this day.

Optimal aging has to take into consideration the maintenance of lean muscle mass and that requires muscle stress and quality protein.

As Dr. Mark Hyman is fond of saying, “You have to eat muscle to make muscle”.  He’s referring to the challenge of adding healthy lean muscle by eating a strict vegetarian diet.

Due to sarcopenia, we will lose 5 lbs. of lean muscle per decade unless we strength train and eat properly to keep it on. Left unabated sarcopenia can leave us frail as we enter our seventies and eighties.

From age 30 to age 70 most of us, who do not strength train properly to maintain muscle, will lose 20 lbs. of muscle due to sarcopenia. That means if we’re the same weight at age 70 as we were at age 30, we’re actually carrying 20 extra pounds of body fat.

An intelligent lifelong regiment of strength training an eating moderate amounts of fish and meat can counteract sarcopenia.

Thankfully, many farmers are finally waking up to the fact that we all want healthier meats. So, there is an effort to offer pasture raised chickens which are out in the fields eating what they can scratch up. Plus, cattle that allowed to graze off of grass in the fields are much healthier than pen raised, corn fed cattle.

The New Microbiome Dimension

Our brain power has worked against us in a number of areas: agriculture, convenience foods, automation, etc. to make us fat and sedentary. We can use our intelligence to go well beyond the hunter-gatherers’ diet and lifestyle.  A big example is our new found knowledge of the microbiome.

The microbiome is a hot topic lately and we’re really just beginning to fully understand the necessity of maintaining a diverse set of healthy “bugs” in our gut and exactly how fiber and the microbiome interact in humans.

“We’re beginning to realize that people who eat more dietary fiber are actually feeding their gut microbiome,” Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford University.  The only way you’re going to get sufficient fiber to your microbiome is to eat high fiber vegetables as there is zero to none available in meat and fats from animal flesh.

Unfortunately, with the standard wester diet of today, we’re consuming less than 15 grams of fiber per day. Health authorities recommend closer to 30 grams per day. Plus, we’re not consuming a diversity of vegetables to optimize gut health.

Related Posts

You’re Really Not Healthy Unless You Also Have a Healthy Gut — Here’s How

 

 

 

(FitCommerce has no financial interest in life insurance companies, we are solely a non-partial advisory.)

Another Switch to Flip

Retirement years are totally different than your previous earnings years. We already posted about changes from saving mode to spending mode in:

Flipping the Switch — When to Start Spending Your Retirement Savings — Guilt Free

When it comes to life insurance during retirement years, there’s yet another switch to flip.

During our earnings years, the major breadwinner in the family had a major burden to keep providing for the spouse and children should they unexpectedly die particularly the hefty cost of providing for college costs.

There will most likely be a heavy mortgage on the house and other debts on cars and the like. Unless you wanted your family out on the street, you needed enough insurance to also eliminate these debts.

But the big enchilada is that loss of income to the family when you’re gone. It most likely would lead to a severe drop in lifestyle.

So, you piled up the life insurance and because you were relatively young, it didn’t cost that much. In fact, your employer may have even provided it as a group benefit scaled to your salary. You were covered.

Then Financial Risks Shift Later in Life

There’s a noticeable shift in the later years. You’re an empty nester, the kids are off on their own and gainfully employed, you’re no longer responsible for their financial welfare. Your mortgage is paid off. You’ve made significant contribution to your social security account and can look forward to steady monthly check for the rest of your life. You’ve made consistent contributions to you 401(k) or IRA and now have a sizeable nest egg.

All those responsibilities you had during your earnings years have peeled off, but you’re not out of the woods yet. When you retire you will no longer have employment earnings. How will you make up the gap?

Other than public sector workers, less than 5% of private sector workers have a pension. In the case of public sector employees, they could expect a drop of between 25% to 50% in income as they shift from salary to pension. In the case of most private sector employees, it drops to zero.

Now the risks shift to income stream preservation for the surviving spouse. It’s now time to determine if late stage life insurance makes sense.

The Biggest Fear is Our Survivor Outliving the Money

The biggest fear among boomers is not dying but outliving their money as they age. The fear is that in their eighties or nineties they’ll be living in poverty.

Generally, when you retire and your steady income drops you will need to start drawing down from your IRA to supplement social security. But if you’re alive and still bringing in income you may not have to tap into your IRA. So, the thought process is, should you suddenly drop dead and your income evaporates, is your current IRA balance significant enough to take care of your partner for the next 10-20 years?  That is worrisome.

Not be a Burden to Your Children

It’s pretty much universal that no boomer wants to stick their adult children with a big financial responsibility.  We want our children to thrive and meet their own family’s financial needs without the added burden of supporting a surviving elderly parent.

So, that’s another perspective to take when considering whether to take out additional life insurance.

The Financial Risks When You Retire — It’s Not About Just You

Many boomers may have the blinders on that they’ve lived a good life and are ready to die at any time. But they have to take the blinders off and thing carefully about their survivors, namely their surviving partner. Will they be OK should you suddenly die?

Loss of your business / job income

In this instance, let’s say you have a part-time job or an independent business that brings in $40K a year. Nice. However, should you suddenly drop dead, poof that income stream dissolves and your partner no longer has that income.

That could place a heavy burden and angst on them to draw more heavily from the IRA and run a risk of outliving the money. It’s a good reason to look at an affordable life insurance policy.

Drop in Pension Benefits

If you’re one of the lucky people who have a pension, then due to ERISA and REA acts some portion of the pension is transferable to your spouse or civil partner.  But, most likely it won’t be the full 100% until death. It could range from a lump sum buyout to a percentage of the pension.

Again, when you die, there will be less income coming into the household. Will social security plus IRA drawdown be enough for them to comfortable get to end of life?  A little life insurance may help.

The Social Security Safety Net

There is good news. Should you die and your social security income be higher than your spouses, then they can collect yours. So, at least there’s a floor of income for life.

How Much Life Insurance Should You Carry in Your Later Years?

By the time you retire there is a different perspective on position in life.  By now, your children are out of the nest and on their own. And most of your living years are behind you and not in front of you which means less money is required for your surviving partner to make it to their end of life. You should now consider the following to assess if you still need life insurance; will there be enough cash on hand to:

• Dispose of You
• Dispose of Debt
• Get through Probate
• Pay Estate Taxes

Enough to Dispose of You

Dying ain’t cheap. When you die, something has to be done with your remains and depending upon burial vs. cremation and throw in a memorial service and feed the mourners, it could be a significant piece of change. You don’t want your partner, in a mourning state, to have to pinch pennies at this stage of the game.  There are affordable burial insurance you can purchase to alleviate.

Enough to Dispose of Debt

Hopefully your mortgage has been fully paid off for a while and you detest credit cards. But, let’s say you took out an emergency home improvement loan to fix a leaking roof for $15K. It would be wise not to stick that expense on your partner when you die but have enough insurance to wipe it clean.

Enough Liquid Cash to Get Through Probate

Even if you have a significant net worth when you die, if it’s all in your name, it will be tied up in probate for anywhere from 6 months to a year.  Even though your surviving partner will have a significant transfer or wealth down the road the first year’s financial angst can be lessened with enough life insurance to get through the first year.

Estate Tax Considerations

If you’re without a spouse or partner and your will names others as beneficiaries, such as children, other relatives, friends, or charities, you may not want to burden them with the estate taxes and want insurance sufficient to cover such.

Is Life Insurance for Seniors Affordable?  The Risk / Reward Math

Here’s an example of a 70-something male, non-smoker with a single moderate pre-existing condition.  For him to take out a 15 year $100K policy will cost him roughly $300 per month. (This was a quick online quote, it can most likely be shopped around for greater savings).

Over the 15 years, that $300 per month policy will run a full $57,240 of expenditure. If he doesn’t die in that time frame and collect, the insurance company won that bet and he is out of that money. Sounds like a lot, probably would have paid for 3 trips to Europe, or a back yard pool, or a nice tuition contribution to the grandchildren.

But the flip side is should he die within the policy period, his partner will receive the $100K, will offer some financial relief during a period of extreme grief. At least during the mourning period there won’t be any financial stress.

Now let’s look at it from the perspective of a Las Vegas odds handicapper. Do you want to wager $57,240 on the chances of a $100,000 payout?  Will that person in question will die within 15 years?

Using the Social Security Administration’s quick online calculator, the average U.S. male age 70 can expect to live an additional 15.3 years bringing it up to 85 which is right on the cusp.

A big decision factor is affordability. Can the couple afford the $3,600 per year for the coverage? That may in and of itself be a burden. Assuming you can make the annual payments without severe sacrificing, taking out this policy looks like a good action to take.

Finally, stating the obvious, you can only take out the life insurance while you’re healthy, that is, have no pre-existing conditions that will prevent getting coverage at all. If you wait too long and your health declines you may well be out of luck.

 Is t Possible You Don’t Need Any Life Insurance at All?

Yes, it’s conceivable.  Given a situation where it’s you and your partner living together. The house is totally paid for and has been kept up. You have zero debt. You both draw down social security, have $1 million plus in your IRA, and you have a pension that’s 50% or better transferable to your survivor.

Should you suddenly die, it’s conceivable that your survivor can get by quite nicely on social security, the modified pension and conservative IRA withdrawals without any worry about outliving the money.

 

Obesity, the Problem That Just Won’t Go Away

We’ve heard over and over again with practically every health bulletin, the developed world is getting fatter and subsequently less healthy due to metabolic syndrome.

Metabolic Syndrome is a group of risk factors which are:

1. increased belly fat
2. High triglycerides
3. Elevated blood pressure
4. High blood sugar
5. Low HDL

People who have metabolic syndrome are five times more likely to develop diabetes and twice more likely to develop a stroke or heart attack.

We are well aware that it’s not just about counting calories but about the glycemic index of carbohydrates that quickly convert to glucose in the bloodstream. High glycemic carbs convert to glucose so quickly that they trigger a rapid and excessive insulin release. Insulin is that powerful hormone which instructs the body’s adipose tissues to store fat immediately, and not only that, but put a padlock on it so no matter how many hours on the treadmill, it can’t be accessed.

On the glycemic scale of 1-100, the higher the number the larger the spike in insulin. Pure glucose has a glycemic index of 100.

The food industry knows that sweet foods taste better and therefore sell more. The real issue doesn’t lie with the sugar bowl on your dinner table, it lies with the added hidden sugar that we find in practically all prepared foods. If you read food labels, you will be hard pressed to find foods with zero sugar added. But the real culprit lies with the soft drink industry with, in some cases,  a whopping 9 teaspoons of sugar per 12-ounce can.

It’s not the sugar bowl on our table, per se, all indications point to added sugars in our foods as the main culprit to our health decline.

Jack LaLanne’s Story About Sugar

Jack LaLanne was a popular TV exercise personality and health guru in the fifties and was ultra-fit and healthy. But was a self-confessed sugaraholic as a teenager.

“I was a weak, sick kid. When I was thirteen years old, I developed this terrific habit of eating sugar. My whole life was sugar, sugar, sugar. It destroyed all the B vitamins and affected my brain. I had this uncontrollable temper, tried to kill my brother on two occasions, failing grades, troublemaker in school and then, when I was about fifteen, the authorities had the doctors take me out of school for six months.”

Soon thereafter, LaLanne heard an inspirational talk given by a local nutritionist at the Oakland Women’s City Club and he committed to overcoming his sugar addiction, “I went home that night and I said, ‘Dear God or somebody, I need help.’ I didn’t say, make me a Mr. America; make me a straight-A student. I said, just give me the willpower to refrain from these foods that are killing me, all this sugar, sugar, sugar, all this processed food.”

Of course, he did and was an inspiration to all of us until his death at the age of 96.

Sugar Turns Your Skin into an Old Boot

Care about your complexion? Then be acutely aware of the hazards of sugar.

According to Dr. Nicholas Perricone, a noted and highly published dermatologist and expert on anti-aging, sugar actually accelerates skin aging:

“Even a healthy body is damaged by sugar in a phenomenon known as glycation. When foods rapidly convert to sugar in the bloodstream, as high glycemic carbohydrates do, they cause browning, or glycating of the protein in your tissues. …When glycation occurs in your skin, the sugar molecules attach themselves to the collagen fibers where they trigger a series of spontaneous chemical reactions. These reactions culminate in the formation of gradual accumulation of irreversible cross links between adjoining collagen molecules. … the bond between the sugar and collagen generates a large number of free radicals leading to more inflammation… Over time, skin begins to resemble a cross between beef jerky and an old boot. ”

Wait, It Gets Worse

Did you ever have a sugar craving; you know, one of those nights in front of the TV where you’d give your kingdom form a Hershey’s bar? For those of you that are closet junk food junkies, you may actually have a physical addiction.

In a noted Princeton University study, scientists found that the urge to eat sugar shares some of the physiological characteristics as drug dependencies, similar to morphine or heroin.

Bart Hoebel’s Princeton team studied rats who binged on sugar and showed signs of withdrawal — such as “the shakes” and changes in brain chemistry — when the scientists blocked the effects of sugar in the rats’ brains.

Hoebel says sugar triggers production of the brain’s natural opioids, “We think that is a key to the addiction process. The brain is getting addicted to its own opioids as it would to morphine or heroin. Drugs give a bigger effect, but it is essentially the same process,”

Why are We Obsessed with Sweetness Anyway?

According to Barry Sears, author of the Zone Diet, to understand the optimal human diet we need only to look at our pre-historic ancestors and what they ate. That’s because we stopped evolving about 100,000 years ago and our bodies are fine-tuned to the hunter-gatherers we were at that time. There were no sugar refineries back then.

Our ability to cultivate mass quantities of sugar cane and refine it, and ship it worldwide is a relatively new phenomenon. It wasn’t a staple in our survival diet when we were hunter-gatherers. In fact, it didn’t start to become popular in Europe until around 1650; yet today, one would be hard pressed to find anyone with a diet totally devoid of sugar. Its consumption curve has been a continual upward slope.

The Sugar Odyssey

With the premise that the homo sapiens’ body stopped evolving about 100,000 years ago,  if we want clues as to the food mixtures our bodies evolved to optimize, we have to be aware of what our hunter-gatherer forbearers were consuming on a consistent basis. One food in particular that did not exist on a recurring basis was sugar. In the millions of years of evolution, sugar has only been a staple in our diet in relatively recent times and it has raised havoc with our health.  And guess what else? Fossil discoveries indicate that our hunter-gatherer forbearers also had excellent teeth, little or no tooth loss due to cavities, it’s the sugar, stupid.

Prehistoric	Hunter-gatherers only ate occasional sugar from foraged fruits, berries and honey.  That’s the level our bodies evolved to being able to healthily consume.
8000 BC:	Sugar cane was first domesticated in New Guinea.
6000 BC	Sugar cane made its way to the Philippines and then India.
1000 AD	Few Europeans even knew of the existence of cane sugar.
1100 AD	Sugar arrives in Europe in small quantities, it was only afforded as a novelty by the wealthy class.
1493 AD	Sugar Cane was brought to the New World from the Spanish Canary Islands by Columbus on his second voyage. Later, Santo Domingo was successful in growing it as cash crop.
1516	Sugar fields are established in the Caribbean and sugar began a steady flow back to Europe used primarily as a medicine, a spice or decorative substance.
1650	Sugar began to change from a luxury to being more widely adopted in major European nations.
1750	Peoples’ lust for sweetness takes hold, sugar cane is grown in mass quantities and refinement methods improve, output expands, prices drop and most people can now afford sugar, even the poorest English farm laborer’s wife took sugar in her tea.
1800	Sugar starts to become a necessity in Europe and U.S., a staple in the kitchen, consume about 4 pounds per person per year.
1886	Atlanta druggist Dr. John Styth Pemberton invented “Coca-Cola” syrup using melted sugar, water and other ingredients.
1876	Daniel Peter, a Swiss candy maker, developed milk chocolate made with copious quantities of sugar
1894	Milton Hershey established the Hershey Chocolate Company, which mass produced quality chocolate bars at low prices. Another bullet in the sugar chamber.
1950	Since it became readily available in 1750, per capita sugar consumption grows more than 400% in 200 years
1970’s	High Fructose Corn Syrup is developed as an alternative to table sugar. It is used mainly as a sweetener in processed foods.
1980	Hurricane Allen destroyed much of the sugar crop in Caribbean and South U.S. , so high fructose corn syrup came in to take its place as a sweetener and it became more prevalent.
1995	Average Americans consume about 20 teaspoons of table sugar per day.
2000	Average Americans consume about 100 pounds of sugar per year.
2003	Added sugar comprises about 15.7% of the calories consumed by the average American and 20% of teenagers.
2020	Average Americans drop sugar consumption to 90 pounds per year, yet obesity and diabetes kept rising.

 

We’ve increased our consumption of sugar by 25x to 100 lbs. per year, from 4 lbs. per year in the early 1800’s to 100 lbs. per year today.

Sugar consumption in the US peaked in 2000. Then, from 2000 – 2020 it dropped from 100 lbs. per year to 90 lbs. Yet the obesity rate kept rising. What gives?  It turns out to be the cumulative effect of sugar consumption over the previous years.

How Did We Get Here?

In our “modern society” it’s all about convenience and saving time. This pertains particularly to mealtime. Who wants to peel potatoes and cut up carrots, it’s so much easier to grab a pre-packaged meal out of the freezer, a few minutes in the microwave and “presto, dinner’s ready”.

There’s a price to pay for this. We’ve subordinated the preparation of our food to an external entity that is less concerned with the nutrition going into our bodies than it is with profit growth. They want you to buy today and buy even more tomorrow. Hence, they’ve flavored the meal and/or snack to make it absolutely addicting. The easiest way to do that is with added sweeteners. They’ve been engineered to have the perfect ratio of sugar, fat, salt, and in some instances crunch, that tickle our taste buds and the dopamine rush keeps us coming back for more.

Our taste buds have grown so accustomed to sweet tasting foods that all foods taste downright bland without those sweeteners. But, healthwise it takes a toll.

Metabolic syndrome, obesity and Type II diabetes are continually on the rise with little end in sight. Now there’s a new malady showing up, fatty live disease, that was originally thought to be caused solely by alcohol consumption, but since 5-year-olds are now contracting it, that blows that theory out of the water.  Mounting evidence shows that it is most likely fructose, a very particular form of sugar, that can only be processed by the liver.

Fructose – The hidden Nemesis

Sounds so innocuous, have a fruit pack for a snack or 100% fruit juice with your meal.  All those vitamins, right? Well, not so fast, they’re also loaded with fructose.

  Why is Fructose a Concern?

A down and dirty lesson on sugar. Table sugar is sucrose which is actually a disaccharide composed of roughly 50% glucose and 50% fructose. When you digest table sugar, it broken down into those two component parts and is picked up by the bloodstream.

Glucose is actually needed by the human body, it is used to retore needed glycogen in the muscles and liver for immediate energy. If you eat an apple, yes it has fructose, but it’s not that damaging. That’s because you’re balancing the natural fructose with fiber and water which slows down its digestion to a more innocuous level.  But too much manufactured fructose can cause issues according to UC San Diego School of Medicine.

“Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is the most common cause of chronic liver disease in the world. It can progress to more serious conditions, such as cirrhosis, liver cancer, liver failure and death,” said Michael Karin, Ph.D. “These findings point to an approach that could prevent liver damage from occurring in the first place.”

“…Fructose is two to three times more potent than glucose in increasing liver fat, a condition that triggers Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. And the increased consumption of soft drinks containing high fructose corn syrup corresponds with its growth.”

Kick the Sugar Habit — Actions you can Take Today

Don’t rely on the government to look out for your health. The USDA’s original food pyramid was actually a major contributor to our rampant obesity problem. Too many food corporation lobbyists had their fingerprints on it. So, take it upon yourself to monitor your food intake.

Sounds obvious, but read the food labels. If there are ingredients that end in “ose”, that’s sugar added (lactose, fructose, sucrose, etc.). Minimize the intake of these, you’ll go a long ways to regaining your health.

Stop all intake of high fructose corn syrup. If you see a food label with it as an ingredient, drop it as if it were scalding your hands.

In addition to reducing your intake of sugar, reduce your intake of high glycemic carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are converted to sugar. Luckily, not all carbohydrates are created equal, some are converted to sugar more rapidly than others.

The Glycemic Index ranges from 0 to 100. Pure table sugar (sucrose) has a glycemic index of 100. Low-glycemic foods have a glycemic load of 55 or lower and typically include most vegetables, beans, and some whole grains. Foods such as bananas, raisins, and sweet potatoes are considered to be medium-glycemic foods and are ranked between 56 and 69. High-glycemic foods are ranked at 70 and above and include white and French breads, most breakfast cereals, instant rice, French fries, and cheese pizza.

Meats, fish and olive oil typically rank zero on the glycemic scale.

Food substitutions

Now that you’re aware to pivot toward lower glycemic foods, think about merely making the following substitutions when you prepare meals:

• Replace corn with dark rice
• Replace peanut butter with almond butter
• Remove the burger bun and replace with lettuce
• Replace white potato with sweet potato
• Replace wheat pasta with chickpea pasta
• Replace cow’s mike with almond milk

Keep Moving

Movement and exercise will go far in burning off excess sugar in your system.  Between limiting your ingestion of sugar and burning off what you can, you’ve started the path to better health.

The TV ad sounds so attractive. Put away some money each month today and then when you retire, it flips into reverse and you get a guaranteed check each month for life, no matter how long you live.

It’s called a “fixed annuity” and it’s not a whole lot distant from the way term life insurance is priced out. You have a large pool of people and a certain amount will live a long time and keep paying into the system. This will offset those unfortunates few who die young and pull money out. As long as the actuaries do their jobs, the insurance company prices it all in and still makes money.

The major difference is with a life insurance policy you’re betting you’re going to die young and the insurance company is betting you’re going to live long (and keep collecting premiums).

With an annuity, you’re betting you’re going to live a long time and the insurer is betting you’ll die young.

Conceptually it’s all the same, a bunch of people pay into a pool and the risk is shared.

If you’re assessing whether an annuity is good for you, you need to assess yourself first. How healthy are you? Does longevity run in your family? What is your risk tolerance to investing in a variable annuity?  Are you capable of foregoing an annuity and managing your own IRA?

A Primer on the Major Categories of Annuities

There are many flavors of annuities to choose from. We’ll just summarize the most popular handful..

Deferred or Immediate

There are two basic types of annuities: deferred and immediate. With a deferred annuity, your money is invested for a period of time until you are ready to begin taking withdrawals, typically when you start retirement. You may even be making regular deposits during your working years.

If you opt for an immediate annuity you begin to receive payments soon after you make your initial investment. Think of it as a personal pension.

Fixed or Variable

Fixed Annuity basically means you will receive a set amount for the rest of your life regardless of how long you live. This is also regardless of how the stock market or interest rates perform, you’re shielded from its vicissitudes.

However, in boom years when the stock market is doing well, you will not participate in the growth whatsoever.

In contract, variable annuities allow you to participate in the fortunes of the stock market. When it goes up, your principal goes up, but also when it goes down so does your principal. Are you willing to take the risk?

The decision is personal and depends upon your risk tolerance, how long you can wait out a down market, and do you need a fixed amount of money to live off of? Soon, perhaps even today?  It’s a trade-off between safety vs. rolling the dice.

If you’re early in your retirement and have a high tolerance for risk, then you may have the right profile for a variable annuity. This means that your principal will be subject to the vicissitudes of the stock market. You can have up years but also those oh so dreadful down years.

We’ll talk later about the commissions and fees of variable annuities that erode your principal.

Equity-Indexed Variable Annuity

There are financial pundits out there espousing the merits of indexed variable annuities as a win without losing choice. But are they, too, too good to be true?

There is a tool to mitigate the risk, it’s called “equity-indexed variable annuity”. The insurance company will guaranty you have no down years, it could go to zero but not in the negatives. And, you’ll enjoy the up years but it will be capped at a certain percentage, say 7%.

You may think it’s a no-brainer, but over time you may be forfeiting large gains when there is a bull market as we are currently experiencing (2021).

For example, an equity-indexed variable annuity may have a no-loss clause. That means when the market goes negative you can only go to zero but not lose. On the flip side, when the market goes up you participate in that growth. Win/win right?

So, how does the insurance company make any money? They make money because there will be a cap on the upside, say 7% per year.  When the market exceeds that growth in any given year you will not enjoy those returns.

For the 30-year period from 1990 to 2019, compare a 7% equity-indexed annuity has an annualized return of 4.91% vs. the annualized return of the S&P 500 of 9.96%.  That’s a lot of moolah over the 30 years.

Get the Right Help

When sorting through your options of which flavor of annuity is best for you, you best get sound advise from an expert, but beware of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Make sure the person advising you is not out for their own interests.

In the old days, there was a job description called “stock broker”. Remember them, they called incessantly trying to convince you to buy that latest hot stock.  Then, a short while later they try to convince you to sell it whether it goes up or down. They don’t make money unless you’re trading – “Churn em and burn em, baby”.

Then the world changed, trading margins shrank (today they’re zero) and a person calling you up to convince you to buy an individual stock became a dinosaur.

Don’t feel sorry for them, those stock brokers were retooled to become “financial advisors”.  Now instead of getting a commission on buying and selling individual stocks for you, they convince you to let them invest your entire IRA with them in mutual funds and/or annuities.  They can only make money if they sell you their company’s products.  And, some products offer far higher commissions than others. Which ones do you think they’ll suggest?

It’s like giving the keys of the henhouse to the fox.

When it comes to sorting out the complexities of the various annuities, it’s best to hire a “fiduciary”. They’re highly trained, and legally must give you the soundest prudent investment choices. They charge a fee for advice and do not make commissions.

85% of financial advisors are not fiduciaries, so make sure you know what you’re talking to.

Purchase an Annuity or Go it Alone?

Retirees always have the option of foregoing annuities and managing their own IRA. Going this self-managing route incorporates three important considerations:

1. Stock Market Risk Mitigation
2. Proper Asset Allocation
3. Withdrawal Calculations

Having any portion of your retirement funds in the stock market carries a certain amount of risk. The risk is compounded by individual investors trying to pick their own stocks and trying to time when to buy and sell. Most are terrible at this. However, the risk can be reduced by buying indexed funds such as the S&P 500 where you’re not beholden to the performance of any one stock.

Proper asset allocation is key because if you’ve experienced anything like the financial setback in 2008, you realize that when the next one happens, it could take as long as 5 years to fully recover your principal. If you’re in your late seventies, can you endure that prolonged dip?

The solution is to have two buckets of investments, one for growth and the other for safety. The mix changes in accordance with your age and risk tolerance.

For more on Asset Allocation Read:

Don’t Outlive your Money in Retirement

IRA withdrawal calculations are also somewhat of a crystal ball consideration. You have to predict, on average, what the growth rate of your IRA will be over the next 20 years or so. Then calculate how much you can withdraw each year while not eroding the principal – you may need it for end-of-life expenses.

For more on IRA withdrawal formulas read:

Flipping the Switch — When to Start Spending Your Retirement Savings — Guilt Free

 

Can you, as an average investor, manage your own investment portfolio to account for:

• Early death — and not enjoying your money while you’re alive.
• Living a long life – and then run out of money when you’re really old.
• Having your surviving partner inherit your IRA with minimal taxes
• Riding through an extended stock market correction as in 2008?

If you don’t have a pension and you have a small social security payment and have to rely on your IRA for necessary expenses, the fixed annuity option looks more favorable than going it alone.

Conversely, If you have a pension (or perhaps some business income) and substantial social security, own your home outright, are debt free, then you can afford to forego the annuity option and try and increase your wealth by self-managing your IRA.

Commissions and Fees the twin Piranhas that Eat Away at Your Wealth

The variable annuity route on the surface looks like a chance to participate in the market’s growth while giving you disposable income. However, there a couple of differences to self-management.

In all likelihood someone sells you that annuity and that someone is not going to do it for nothing, she or he will be getting a nice commission, as high as 8% and that comes out of your pocket.

Also, the insurance company will debit your account for their numerous fees, most of which are buried deep in your statement. You’ll be paying upwards of 2% per year of your hard-earned dollars for their performance or lack thereof.

One fee is the management fee for managing the portfolio. This is interesting since 93% of mutual fund managers cannot beat the S&P 500. They may be able to show winnings in the short run but over time they lose yet they still charge you.

Simple math, 2% of a $500K principle is a whopping $10,000 per year – Sayonara.

Then, if you get sick of this madness and want to pull your money out, there are surrender penalties of up to 10% for early withdrawal protected by an iron clad contract.

Caveat Emptor

Some aspects of annuities are favorable such as the concept of a fixed annuity for life without ever fearing outliving your money. That offers peace of mind as you age.

However, a lot of insurance companies hire aggressive “financial advisors”, a/k/a salespeople, that push their most profitable products, namely variable annuities.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 218,000 “personal financial advisors” in the U.S. as of May 2020. It’s a lucrative profession.

If you want to venture into the arcane world of variable annuities, it would be best to avoid a commission based financial advisor, and hire a fee-based fiduciary to help you sort through your options and avoid costly mistakes – mistakes that can cost you tens of thousands of dollars over the life of your annuity. To complicate matters, depending upon your age and employment, there are complicated tax angles that a fiduciary can help you sort through.