First, let’s give you the good news: American workers and retirees are expressing rising confidence that they will have enough money to live comfortably in retirement, according to a major national survey. Now here’s the bad news: that high level of confidence is almost entirely unsupported by the facts. That’s the inescapable conclusion from reading…
The ads on television, the slick brochures and the finely-targeted websites for today’s retirement homes typically portray the same types of images: groups of seniors happily doing things together. They take bike trips together, they do wine tasting together, they go antiquing together. If all that advertising were to be believed, retirement living today is…
Are you going to spend less after you retire, or will you spend more? That may seem like an odd question: conventional wisdom suggests that retirement living is almost always cheaper than pre-retirement living. But many people find their experience defies conventional wisdom, and that suggests to us that it’s essential for most retirees to…
A new documentary on dementia has just premiered this past week on Netflix¸ and it’s sure to attract a lot of attention. We haven’t seen it yet, but we did discover this article about the documentary on the Newsweek website. The article features an interview about the disease with Dr. John DenBoer, a dementia researcher…
Being a generous parent is usually a good thing. After all, most of us want to help out our kids as much as we can, especially when they’re first starting out on their own. But this recent article on the Bankrate.com website pointed out a darker side of parental generosity: a significant number of parents…
If you were managing a fast food restaurant, you would hire the best employees you could find: people who were reliable, punctual and friendly – not to mention people willing to work for minimum wage. According to this interesting article published last fall by Bloomberg, a growing number of restaurant chains are finding these ideal…
Here at AgingOptions we often say that aging is a family affair – another way of saying that parents need to involve their adult kids in their plans for the future. We’ve seen too many families fall apart because mom and dad never made their wishes clear. Others have faced financial pressure because the parents…
Another year, another pessimistic report about Social Security. This past week the annual report from the trustees for the federal government’s Social Security and Medicare programs was released, and while it showed some slight improvement in short-term outlook, the long-range forecast remains gloomy. As the rapidly-growing number of retirees collides with a shrinking labor force,…
The typical hospital emergency room can be a chaotic place. Trauma victims, people suffering from drug overdoses, families bringing in sick kids, and a host of others facing various medical crises are all being served – eventually – by a harried staff of doctors, nurses and orderlies doing their best to keep people moving through…
If there were one key to a satisfying and happy retirement, what do you suppose it would be? A big bank account? A fancy condo on the beach? Great health insurance? The answer, say the experts, may surprise you: the key to happiness and satisfaction later in life is to have a healthy network of…