Monday, October 30, 2017

Still Making a Good Living at 70?

From the Toronto Globe&Mail newspaper money guru -

'The new retirement age is 70: U.S. personal finance guru Suze Orman says that if you stop working in your 60s, you might need to support yourself for another 30 years. How can you afford to live well into your 90s? One way is by working until age 70.

 

To some extent, this is a U.S. perspective driven by higher health care costs than we face in Canada. But Ms. Orman is definitely onto something in terms of how longer lifespans are affecting personal finance. If we live longer, working past 65 can make sense from both an emotional and financial point of view. “Every dollar you don’t spend in your 60s is a dollar that can keep growing for your 70s and beyond,” she says.'

 

The trouble with nominating 70 as the new standard end-of-work date is that these days during and after our 50s much more effort than in the past is spent on living healthier and sustaining body functionality, with the result that most of us take increasingly longer to die. Often we now get a late life of long-tail decline rather than an abrupt and dramatic end. Vigour decreases and many more 'parts' need attention. Modern medicine and nutrition helps keep us functioning to a degree but not with the focus and endurance needed for today's working world.

I doubt I'm any more capable in my early 70s of the effort required to have anyone pay me a wage that my dad was at that age. I just spend way more personal time with health care providers (now an old guy's 'best friends' and his main source of Xmas cards) than he could.