After I read Dr. Sanjay Gupta's book, "Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age," I was left with several compelling ideas. The most profound was: do something different to help create new neural pathways which will help keep the old brain sizzling. 
It didn't matter whether it was carrying your coffee mug in the other hand, taking up a new language or tripping over your feet learning to play pickleball, mindfulness would improve mental acuity and help stave off memory loss. It would also add to a life that might have become a tad too routine (but that is my observation, not Dr. Gupta's).
Habitat for Humanity volunteers building a house in the Los Angeles areaWhen I showed up on a Saturday morning last year at a local Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Habitat for Humanity construction site, Dr. Gupta wasn't on my mind. I had simply responded when a woman friend had rallied a coterie of distaff older adults to join her Women Build construction team. We had bright fuchsia T-shirts reading: "As girls we played house, as Women we build them" and sporting our team logo, "We nailed it!" on the back.  
I arrived at the designated address, and I saw a rainbow of shirts onsite, but no other fuchsias; I didn't know anyone else there. Gupta challenge No.1: Remember everyone's name. But that was not an issue because we each printed our name on a piece of duct tape and stuck it on our shirts.
A Role for Everyone 
The variously colored T-shirts, I soon learned, were shorthand for their wearer's relationship with Habitat. Ms. Judy's orange shirt was proudly emblazoned with the title "homeowner" indicating that this compact, well-designed, three bedroom, one-and-a-half bath cottage would soon be hers. She told me she was thrilled to be moving there from a cramped efficiency apartment.  
I came to believe their shirts had been dyed in a solution of patience and good humor, in order to deal with novices like me. 
Several green "Partner" shirts were worn by homeowners-to-be, working to fulfill a requirement to invest 255 hours of sweat equity before qualifying as potential Habitat homeowners. A clutch of fresh-faced twentysomethings wore white or gray shirts with an Americorps insignia; they were spending several months in Baton Rouge on FEMA projects.
Habitat regulars, much closer to my age, were clad in official, tan Habitat tees and our two supervisors sported mustard-colored shirts imprinted with "Staff." During the course of the day, I came to believe their shirts been dyed in a solution of patience and good humor, in order to deal with novices like me. 
A passer-by observing the dusty site would have seen Ms. Judy's unfinished home surrounded by a diverse and motley crew — white, Black, young, old, female, male, preppy and scruffy — and heard the metallic pinging of hammers, the droning buzz of saws, and cheerful laughter and chatter among the construction crew. But no passer-by could have detected the aura of goodwill and dedication that filled the air along with the swirls of dust and sawdust.  
"Have you done this before?" he inquired as he waved toward a stack of planks and an electrical tool with a forbidding steel nose.
Our job that day was to precision nail Hardie planks in careful overlap onto the walls of the small front porch. Since I begged off climbing a ladder, the supervisor assigned me to measure and cut the long boards which would span the expanses and fill spaces around doors and windows.
"Have you done this before?" he inquired as he waved toward a stack of planks and an electrical tool with a forbidding steel nose. Never, I replied, but he didn't bat an eye and instructed his co-worker to teach me what to do: measure and mark planking using a professional steel square; create a straight line down the board by unspooling and twanging a magic red string called a chalk liner; operate the heavy electric shear specially designed to cut Hardie boards, both horizontally (difficult to follow the red line!) and vertically; and apply thick white base paint over the cut surfaces to protect them from weathering.  
We worked from 8:00 until 2:30 with morning and lunch breaks, both times when we strangers mingled and chatted together. By quitting time, I'd almost gotten the hang of measuring and shearing the planks to spec; I'd even begun to slap white paint on the cut edges with panache, though admittedly I also decorated my arms and fuchsia T-shirt. And the next day my right arm was sore from the intensity of guiding the blade, the heft of the tool itself, and my fierce desire to get it right. 
Building My Skills 
The second time I volunteered at Ms. Judy's house, we were assigned to paint the exterior. The paint was a lovely dove grey, the brush as wide as my hand — not a Dr. Gupta exercise but rewarding, and it added new splashes of color to my T-shirt. Then we moved inside to paint with rollers and brushes. I was assigned the former — new to me but, again, I figured, in the interest of brain development, I would do my best.  
I was sure I'd built new neural pathways and had been completely and joyously out of my usual social environment. 
I was to rub the felt cylinder head at the end of a long pole back and forth in a wedge-shaped bin, to coat it with paint, then roll over a screen to remove the excess. I started the roller about six inches from the top of the wall and rolled down, being careful not to slather, but also not to apply the paint too thinly. It offered a learning curve, plus a physical and mental challenge, which was further extended when I was told to also roller paint the ceiling. Definitely Gupta-worthy as I tried not to slather, not to apply too thinly, keep paint droplets from my eyes and hair (unsuccessful), and use muscles (previously in repose) that were surely similar to those Michelangelo needed for the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
When I left the site that second day, I was even more paint splattered but equally pleased to have been part of a wonderful team with effective, patient leaders, helping Ms. Judy get closer to owning and living in her new home.  
And less altruistically, of course, I'd mindfully followed Dr. Gupta's advice: wading in far beyond my skill set, working with demanding new tools, and revealing latent abilities. I was sure I'd built new neural pathways and had been completely and joyously out of my usual social environment. Enough so that I invited the three twentysomethings from Americorps, plus their six pod-fellows I hadn't met, to come to dinner.
This offered another kind of challenge which I hope would have pleased Dr. Gupta: it represented the first time since I'd downsized two and a half years ago when I had to plan and cook dinner for ten people gathered around my table — and it was a fun evening!


Building Skills and Happiness as a Volunteer

Mary Ann Sternberg

Finally! The U.S. government is beginning to crack down on cramming by cell phone companies.
There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve been a victim of cramming — the practice of placing unauthorized, misleading or deceptive monthly charges of $1.99 to $19.99 on your telephone bill — and don’t even know it. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimates that as many as 20 million American households a year have cramming fees tacked onto their landline bills (the agency doesn’t have a similar figure for wireless bills). These fees show up on bills with vague descriptions, like “service charge,” “membership,” “calling plan” and “voicemail.”
 
Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued T-Mobile US, charging it with adding hundreds of millions of dollars in bogus fees to subscribers' bills for services they never ordered (ringtones, horoscopes, text messages, gossip, etc.). And the FCC announced it was also investigating T-Mobile for cramming.
(MORE: Watch Out for Loopholes in the New Robocall Rules)
T-Mobile has called the FTC suit "unfounded and without merit," so the agency's allegations will be fought in court.
Even so, this is good news to consumers who've been complaining about cell-phone cramming bills for a long time.
Why? Because until recently, the government has said cramming wasn't a problem. In 2012, for example, the FCC issued new anti-cramming rules — but it left a large loophole, applying the rules only to landline phone bills. At the time, the FCC said it got fewer complaints about cramming on cell-phone bills.
 
A Cramming Primer
Before I tell you the best ways to protect yourself against phone crammers, here’s a little primer on the scuzzy practice:
 
For more than two decades, phone companies have permitted other firms — or, in industry parlance, “third-party companies” — to place charges on a consumer’s phone bill. Initially, the third-party charges applied to telephone-related services, like long-distance and paging services, that you could buy from an independent, possibly less expensive, firm. 
 
But phone bills proved so hard for consumers to decipher that some third-party companies soon saw an opportunity to scam them by leveling cramming fees and scooping up the cash.
As law-enforcement officials and telephone companies started paying attention, the scammers’ methods became more sophisticated. They began discreetly hiding charges within the fine print of online sweepstakes, contests or “free trial” offers. Sometimes, they sent out checks that, when endorsed and cashed by a customer, signified approval of the cramming charges. The phone carriers themselves bore no responsibility for oversight.
 
(MORE: The Top Companies for Customer Service)
4 Steps You Can Take
Consumer advocates recommend you take these four steps to prevent cramming charges on your phone bills and to complain if you become a cramming victim:
 
1. Regularly check all your phone bills for unauthorized charges. Then, call your phone company to ask about any fees you don’t understand and dispute all suspicious activity.
 
You should call the phone company, rather than the firm that smacked you with the cramming charge, because it’s often hard to find crammers, especially if they’re scammers.
 
Your phone company might refund fees if you protest, but probably only a few months’ worth of recurring charges. That’s why it’s so important to review your bill carefully every month.
 
2. Ask your phone company about imposing a “bill block” on all third-party billing charges. You’ll want to check with your carrier to see what a block would mean. For some phone companies, a total third-party block could bar you from buying apps for your smart phone or making text donations to charitable causes. If that’s the case, you may decide not to block, but just to become more vigilant reading your bills.
 
3. Read the fine print for anything you’re signing that asks for your telephone number. By entering an online sweepstakes or contest, for instance, you may unknowingly be agreeing to pay monthly fees to the company behind the promotion.
 
4. If you’re a cramming victim, file a complaint with the FCC. Call (888) CALL-FCC or fill out a complaint form online at the FCC’s website. The FCC says it will continue monitoring cramming grievances to see if additional protections are needed. So, like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, if the FCC doesn’t hear from consumers, it won’t know there’s a problem.


How to Prevent 'Cramming' Fees on Your Phone Bills

Caroline Mayer

(Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of the book Lifespan: Why We Age -- and Why We Don't Have To, by David A. Sinclair, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. In the book, published in September 2019, Sinclair explains his theory that aging is actually a disease that is treatable and provides insight into the latest scientific research on aging and longevity.)  

To Everything There Is a Reason
If you are taken aback by the notion that there is a singular cause of aging, you are not alone. If you haven’t given any thought at all as to why we age, that’s perfectly normal, too. A lot of biologists haven’t given it much thought, either. Even gerontologists, doctors who specialize in aging, often don’t ask why we age — they simply seek to treat the consequences.
This isn’t a myopia specific to aging. As recently as the late 1960s, for example, the fight against cancer was a fight against its symptoms. There was no unified explanation for why cancer happens, so doctors removed tumors as best they could and spent a lot of time telling patients to get their affairs in order. Cancer was “just the way it goes,” because that’s what we say when we can’t explain something.
Then, in the 1970s, genes that cause cancer when mutated were discovered by the molecular biologists Peter Vogt and Peter Duesberg. These so-called oncogenes shifted the entire paradigm of cancer research. Pharmaceutical developers now had targets to go after: the tumor-inducing proteins encoded by genes, such as BRAF, HER2, and BCR-ABL.
Aging research today is at a similar stage as cancer research was in the 1960s. ... From the looks of it, aging is not going to be that hard to treat -- far easier than curing cancer.
By inventing chemicals that specifically block the tumor-promoting proteins, we could finally begin to move away from using radiation and toxic chemotherapeutic agents to attack cancers at their genetic source, while leaving normal cells untouched. We certainly haven’t cured all types of cancer in the decades since then, but we no longer believe it’s impossible to do so.
Indeed, among an increasing number of cancer researchers, optimism abounds. And that hopefulness was at the heart of what was arguably the most memorable part of President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address in 2016.
“For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all,” Obama said as he stood in the House of Representatives chamber and called for a “cancer moon shot.” When he placed then Vice President Joe Biden — whose son, Beau, had died of brain cancer a year earlier — in charge of the effort, even some of the Democrats’ staunch political enemies had trouble holding back the tears.
Cancer Research As An Example
In the days and weeks that followed, many cancer experts noted that it would take far more than the year remaining in the Obama-Biden administration to end cancer. Very few of those experts, however, said it absolutely couldn’t be done. And that’s because, in the span of just a few decades, we had completely changed the way we think about cancer. We no longer submit ourselves to its inevitability as part of the human condition.
One of the most promising breakthroughs in the past decade has been immune checkpoint therapy, or simply “immunotherapy.” Immune T-cells continually patrol our body, looking for rogue cells to identify and kill before they can multiply into a tumor.
If it weren’t for T-cells, we’d all develop cancer in our 20s. But rogue cancer cells evolve ways to fool cancer-detecting T-cells so they can go on happily multiplying. The latest and most effective immunotherapies bind to proteins on the cancer cells’ surface. It is the equivalent of taking the invisible cloak off cancer cells so T-cells can recognize and kill them.
Although fewer than 10% of all cancer patients currently benefit from immunotherapy, that number should increase thanks to the hundreds of trials currently in progress.
We continue to rail against a disease we once accepted as fate, pouring billions of dollars into research each year, and the effort is paying off. Survival rates for once lethal cancers are increasing dramatically.
Thanks to a combination of a BRAF inhibitor and immunotherapy, survival of melanoma brain metastases, one of the deadliest types of cancer, has increased by 91% since 2011. Between 1991 and 2016, overall deaths from cancer in the United States declined by 27% and continue to fall. That’s a victory measured in millions of lives.
Aging research today is at a similar stage as cancer research was in the 1960s. We have a robust understanding of what aging looks like and what it does to us and an emerging agreement about what causes it and what keeps it at bay. From the looks of it, aging is not going to be that hard to treat — far easier than curing cancer.
Our Selfish Genes
Up until the second half of the 20th century, it was generally accepted that organisms grow old and die “for the good of the species” — an idea that dates back to Aristotle, if not further. This idea feels quite intuitive. It is the explanation proffered by most people at parties. But it is dead wrong. We do not die to make way for the next generation.
In the 1950s, the concept of “group selection” in evolution was going out of style, prompting three evolutionary biologists, J. B. S. Haldane, Peter B. Medawar and George C. Williams, to propose some important ideas about why we age.
When it comes to longevity, they agreed, individuals look out for themselves. Driven by their selfish genes, they press on and try to breed for as long and as fast as they can, so long as it doesn’t kill them. (In some cases, however, they press on too much, as my great-grandfather Miklós Vitéz, a Hungarian screenwriter, proved to his bride 45 years his junior on their wedding night.)
If our genes don’t ever want to die, why don’t we live forever? The trio of biologists argued that we experience aging because the forces of natural selection required to build a robust body may be strong when we are 18 but decline rapidly once we hit 40 because by then, we’ve likely replicated our selfish genes in sufficient measure to ensure their survival.
Eventually, the forces of natural selection hit zero. The genes get to move on. We don’t.
Medawar, who had a penchant for verbiage, expounded on a nuanced theory called “antagonistic pleiotropy.” Put simply, it says genes that help us reproduce when we are young don’t just become less helpful as we age, they can actually come back to bite us when we are old.
Twenty years later, Thomas Kirkwood at Newcastle University framed the question of why we age in terms of an organism’s available resources. Known as the “Disposable Soma Hypothesis,” it is based on the fact that there are always limited resources available to species -- energy, nutrients, water.
They, therefore, evolve to a point that lies somewhere between two very different lifestyles: breed fast and die young, or breed slowly and maintain your soma, or body. Kirkwood reasoned that organisms can’t breed fast and maintain a robust, healthy body — there simply isn’t enough energy to do both.
Stated another way, in the history of life, any line of creature with a mutation that caused it to live fast and attempt to die old soon ran out of resources and was thus deleted from the gene pool.
Kirkwood’s theory is best illustrated by fictitious, but potentially real-life, examples. Imagine you are a small rodent who is likely to be picked off by a bird of prey. Because of this, you’ll need to pass down your genetic material quickly, as did your parents and their parents before them.
Gene combinations that would have provided a longer-lasting body were not enriched in your species because your ancestors likely didn’t escape predation for long (and you won’t, either).
Now consider instead that you are a bird of prey at the top of the food chain. Because of this, your genes — well, actually, your ancestors’ genes — benefited from building a robust, longer-lasting body that could breed for decades. But in return, they could afford to raise only a couple of fledglings a year.
Kirkwood’s hypothesis explains why a mouse lives three years, while some birds can live to 100. It also quite elegantly explains why the American chameleon lizard, Anolis carolinensis, is evolving a longer lifespan as we speak, having found itself a few decades ago on remote Japanese islands without predators.
The Homo Sapiens Species Stands Apart
These theories fit with observations and are generally accepted. Individuals don’t live forever because natural selection doesn’t select for immortality in a world where an existing body plan works perfectly well to pass along a body’s selfish genes.
And because all species are resource limited, they have evolved to allocate the available energy either to reproduction or to longevity, but not to both. That was as true for M. superstes, as it was and still is for all species that have ever lived on this planet.
All, that is, except one: Homo sapiens.
Having capitalized on its relatively large brain and a thriving civilization to overcome the unfortunate hand that evolution dealt it — weak limbs, sensitivity to cold, poor sense of smell and eyes that see well only in daylight and in the visible spectrum — this highly unusual species continues to innovate.
The Homo sapiens species has already provided itself with an abundance of food, nutrients and water, while reducing deaths from predation, exposure, infectious diseases and warfare.
These were all once limits to its evolving a longer lifespan. With them removed, a few million years of evolution might double its lifespan, bringing it closer to the lifespans of some other species at the top of their game. But it won’t have to wait that long, nowhere near that.
Because this species is diligently working to invent medicines and technologies to give it the robustness of a much longer lived one, literally overcoming what evolution failed to provide.
Copyright © 2019, by David A. Sinclair, from Lifespan, published by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.


This Harvard Geneticist Says People Will Someday Live to 150

David A. Sinclair

It's my clear preference to travel alone, especially for big trips, the ones with oodles of things I want to do. I can avoid late starts because someone takes a long time getting ready or has the audacity to think vacations are for sleeping in.
The Godafoss waterfall in IcelandMy first solo trip to Iceland came in early January 2019. I didn't have to convince anyone it was a good idea to visit a place touting coldness in its name during the time of year it was covered in extended darkness. I had one goal: to see the northern lights. Darkness was integral to the plan.
Being an introvert, I chose to visit Iceland in late May, hoping to improve my chances of seeing the early birds while avoiding the crowds of people known to flock European destinations.
On the only night tour operators decided conditions were suitable, I boarded a bus and stood in a thin blanket of snow in empty fields miles from anywhere, staring at black sky. At one stop the guide casually said, "This would be the perfect place for a murder." There were no deaths, but no swirly streaks in the sky either. Goal unmet.
Strategically Timed Puffin Hunt
Nonetheless, I planned a return with a new goal: puffin pics. Images of these black-and-white sea birds with distinctive bright orange beaks and feet, had been as common as trolls and Vikings on T-shirts in the souvenir shops of Reykjavík, the capital and largest city. But puffins don't winter in Iceland. They spend eight months flying over the Atlantic before coming ashore in summer.
Being an introvert, I chose to visit Iceland in late May, hoping to improve my chances of seeing the early birds while avoiding the crowds of people known to flock European destinations.
I'd already completed the compulsory tourist agenda: the Blue Lagoon, a bus tour of The Golden Circle — Gullfoss (a waterfall), Strokkur (a geyser),  Þingvellir National Park (a valley walk between tectonic plates) — and, most memorable, a glacier hike at Sólheimajökull.
I had also loaded up on culture in the capital: nine museums, including the Punk Museum, housed fittingly in what once was a below-ground men's restroom.
Seeking Solitude on an Island
The bulk of this weeklong adventure would be in places where sheep, horses and hopefully puffins outnumbered humans. At the outset, I had decided I did not want to lose time on shopping and dining.
As a vegetarian, fish and chips were not a draw and, while geothermal hothouses grow vegetables, I was content to grab crispbread, skyr and other munchies in grocery chains like Hagkaup and Bónus.
Reykjavik, IcelandMy travels involved driving counterclockwise on the Ring Road (Route 1) along the country's perimeter but, only two hours from Reykjavík, I deviated, taking a ferry to the town of Vestmannaeyjar on the island of Heimaey.
Puffin Paradise Promised
On the ship, I nabbed a pamphlet touting the destination as having "THE LARGEST PUFFIN COLONY IN THE WORLD." Score! Once docked, I headed to what Google Maps marked as Puffin Lookout on the far end of the island, a mere nine-minute drive.
I walked a path to a wooden shelter providing protection from high winds but, alas, no puffin sightings. Along a cliff, I gazed at lush green landscapes, black-sand beaches and the deep blue ocean below. I saw countless gulls and flocks of sheep, with every ewe seeming to have a black or white lamb hop-running behind.
Closer to town, I walked the rim of Eldfell, a volcano that last erupted over six months in 1973, forcing the urgent evacuation of the island's 5,300 residents. The rust-red ground contrasted with the white houses of town.
The next morning, I ascended stairs and paths to Dalfjall, which AllTrails had the nerve to call a "hill." I walked the ridge as much as I dared. A five-minute drive brought me to the base of Heimaklettur ("Home Rock"). As I climbed, fierce winds shattered the screen of my mobile phone when my jacket pocket clanged against a steel ladder.
I stopped, ostensibly to snap photos of craggy rock formations piercing the ocean's surface, but really to let a local pass. I retreated, thankful to be alone, with no one to say, "Let's not" at the outset or bemoan my, "Let's stop" when my caution button sounded.
Free to Explore
Back on Ring Road, I committed to stopping as often as I wanted. The hours of extended light eliminated any pressure of reaching a night's stay before dark. I walked along Reynisfjara, a popular black-sand beach with a cliffside formed by jagged basalt slabs.
The view from Dalfjall, IcelandI then backtracked to walk the clifftops of the Dyrhólaey Peninsula, another purported puffin-palooza spot. I saw a sand beach extending forever toward the west, an austere white lighthouse and a rock arch jutting into the ocean, but no orange-beaked birdies. Only three hours from Reykjavík, crowds thinned dramatically hereafter.
I drove along the south coast to two glacier lagoons, Fjallsárlón and, 15 minutes east, Jökulsárlón. Icebergs populated both. In the latter, seals popped their heads above the surface as ice floes drifted through a waterway to the North Atlantic.
Few People, Fewer Puffins
The sun did not hit quite right for optimal photos, so I backtracked thirty miles the next morning for retakes, with no one riding shotgun mumbling, "Been there, done that."
I maintained a healthy concern over gasoline. The eastern half of the country is sparsely populated, Egilsstaðir being the largest town, with 2,500 residents. I topped up the tank wherever possible. Very few signs stated the distance to towns that popped up without warning. Restrooms were even rarer, the couple I found requiring the tap of a credit card to pay the 200 krónur (about $1.50) fee.
A basalt cliffside at Reynisfjara black beachI traveled for miles without seeing another vehicle. Occasionally, I wished I had someone to share the sights — "Can you believe this?!" — but it felt reverential letting the ever-changing landscape speak for itself. My contact with the rest of the world was limited to one radio station that broadcast extended Icelandic monologues between unknown pop songs.
Volcanoes, Active and Not
While volcanic eruptions sometimes make international headlines, there are plenty of inactive ones to explore. In the northeast, Hverfjall is a broad black volcano that begs a detour off Ring Road for a half-hour ascent yielding a panorama of nearby mountains and Lake Mývatn.
Nearby is Leirhnjúkur, considered an active volcano (though it's been 40 years since it last erupted). The rocky lava fields have easily walkable paths, allowing closer looks at the otherworldly landscape with steam continuing to escape from fissures. Viti, an explosion crater of the expansive Krafla caldera, is another quick climb, the reward being stunning views of the aquamarine-colored lake that fills it.
Waterfalls are commonplace. Any mountainside may offer narrow trickle, sometimes much more. At one point in eastern Iceland, I stopped to watch a small herd of reindeer near the shore. A 360-survey offered Iceland's greatest hits: ocean, beach, mountains and multiple waterfalls. It was so ridiculously beautiful, I laughed.
Godafoss is a must-stop in north-central Iceland, a broad waterfall interrupted in places by rocky sections which, according to legend, represent pagan statues tossed in when Iceland adopted Christianity.
Iceland's Second City
On my fourth night, I reached Akureyri (population 19,000) in north-central Iceland, the largest city outside the capital region. Come morning, I walked the city's center as a cruise ship navigated Eyjafjörður Fjord below snow-draped mountains. I snapped photographs of marine activity and oddities like knitted coverings for trash receptacles. I yearned for good coffee (which I found) but not conversation.
The Viti crater in the Krafla volcanic regionInstead, I strayed from Ring Road, driving an hour northeast among charming farms to Húsavík, a town renowned for whale watching opportunities. I gazed at the various whale watching vessels but opted out. Leaving town, I stopped at a sleek Nordic-styled viewing shelter I'd spotted on the way in. Puffins, I had read, made cameos in the area. Alone, I took in the vista, perfectly content even without glimpsing the elusive bird.
Throughout my visit, I couldn't shake the notion I should pack more into each day. Nature didn't offer a lights-out to signal turning in. Each night, I kept the windows unobstructed, frequently awakening as if to catch the skies gone dark. Didn't happen. On my final night before returning to Reykjavík, I drove from my cabin to the village of Hvammstangi at 12:30 a.m. to see a fjord view of what was technically sunset. Still, a degree of light lingered.
A 360-survey offered Iceland's greatest hits: ocean, beach, mountains and multiple waterfalls. It was so ridiculously beautiful, I laughed.
Trying a Puffin Tour Boat
On my last day beyond Reykjavík, my incredible trip felt slightly incomplete, still puffin-less. I opened my laptop and searched for puffin tours in the capital. Sure enough, there were one-hour sailings on an "old wooden boat," Skúlaskeið, from Old Harbor with "100% guaranteed" puffin sightings at two offshore islands. Ticket booked! The excursion required sharing space with 32 other people, but the tour guide's commentary filled the time until the captain cut the engine.
We watched in silence as hundreds of puffins floated on the water, flew above and nested on the islands' cliffs. We communicated in camera clicks, smiles and finger pointing as the birds' whirring calls provided a soundtrack.
With only my phone camera at hand, none of my shots proved frame-worthy. I pocketed it and watched in delight as the birds busied themselves, oblivious to our presence.
As things turned out, I didn't have to drive in one big loop around the island to get my puffin fix but, oh, what I would have missed.


Iceland for Introverts

Gregory Walters

A new survey from my company, FlexJobs, of over 1,000 respondents aged 50+ found that flexible work is the No. 1 factor for them when evaluating a job prospect. Flexible work options like telecommuting, flexible schedules, alternative schedules, freelancing and part-time jobs beat out salary and a company’s reputation.
More than three-quarters of them (71 percent) cited a desire for work/life balance. Nearly all (97 percent) said a flexible job would have a positive impact on their overall quality of life, 87 percent thought it would lower their stress and 79 percent thought it would make them more healthy in general.
Flex Work Means Less Stress
Indeed, several studies have discovered that people with flexible jobs report reduced stress levels. One found that 82 percent of telecommuting employees cited improvements in their stress levels when working from home. And 2016 research from the University of Minnesota and MIT Sloan School of Management said workers at a Fortune 500 company in a pilot work flexibility program voiced reduced levels of burnout and psychological stress than other employees there.
As this generation of professionals moves into retirement without actually retiring, they may push employers to adopt flexible work options more readily — to the benefit of workers of all ages.
Employers With Flexible Jobs
If you’re looking for a flexible work opportunity, check out companies such as AT&T, American Express, Intuit and Humana. All have recently posted jobs with flexible work options.
Among FlexJobs’ top 100 employers with remote jobs in 2016 based on the number of telecommuting listings posted over the course of the year: UnitedHealth Group, Dell, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the American Heart Association.
Where to Find 3 Types of Flex Jobs
Here’s where you can find different types of flexible work opportunities after 50:
Setting your own hours: Consider flexible jobs such as academic tutor, resume writer, visiting professor or brand ambassador.
Seasonal and occasional work: Some companies hire seasonal professionals for temporary roles to prepare for the increased holiday demand. Seasonal jobs in marketing, IT, arts and entertainment, accounting and finance and other fields are available starting in September and October.
Other industries hire seasonal workers throughout the year, including tax and accounting, ski and winter resorts, summer travel and tourism, and education.
Part-time schedules: There are a number of high-paying, professional-level, part-time jobs for experienced candidates. They include positions such as curriculum writer, jazz instructor, director of operations and even dentist.


Where the Flexible Jobs Are for People 50+

Brie Weiler Reynolds

We’re always curious how our readers feel about, and use, technology. So, we recently conducted a survey sponsored by Consumer Cellular to find out. The results were more than a little surprising.
To be clear, the survey was more anecdotal than scientific. Some 6,570 people — 78% of them women, 76% between age 55 and 74, most with annual incomes below $75,000 — answered our questions about cellphones, landlines, using the Internet and subscribing to paid digital services from Netflix to Spotify.
In some cases, your responses echoed other surveys of the general public. For instance, 24% primarily access the internet on a cellphone (55% do it from a desktop or laptop computer; 21% via tablet). In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 27% of adults 50 to 64 said they mostly go online using a cellphone.
But in other cases, your views were widely different from Americans overall, especially younger Americans. Highlights:
Landline Phones
A full 57% of respondents said their homes have landline phones. That’s significantly more than the public at large. According to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), 43% of adults live in households with wireless phone service only. And that percentage has been falling annually.
The No. 1 reason readers have landlines: "in case of emergency."
“Older adults are more likely to still have landlines than younger adults,” Stephen Blumberg, director of the division of health interview statistics at the NCHS told me. “They’re more likely than younger people to own their homes and that’s a big reason why they’re more likely to have landlines.”
What’s more 40% of our survey respondents with landlines said they don’t think they’ll ever get rid of their landlines. The rest either thought they would or weren’t sure.
Why do so many Next Avenue readers keep their landlines? About half (47%) said they just like having them. But the No. 1 answer, from 60% of landline owners: “in case of emergency.” They believe that if power went out where they lived and cell phones didn’t work, their landlines still would.
As one survey respondent said: “Cellular is too unreliable to allow it to replace a landline phone for emergencies.”
But this belief in the power of landlines in an emergency may be overstated, according to Blumberg.
“They’re right if they’re talking about plain old phone service with the traditional copper line that comes into the home,” he said. “However, many of the landlines people have today are through their internet providers.” And the technology of the internet companies lacks the same reliability in a power outage as copper cables.
Still, Blumberg added, “in many areas of the country, emergency services are better able to pinpoint the location of a landline than a cellphone in an emergency.” But, he noted, “those differences are changing rapidly over time; more and more areas can pinpoint wireless phones quite effectively.”
Sometimes, survey respondents said, they saw no financial benefit in cutting the phone cord. “I tried to get rid of my landline a couple of years ago, but Century Link said it would cost the same for just internet,” said one. “So we kept the line, but we never use it — too many junk calls.”
Blumberg expects fewer and fewer Americans of all ages will have landlines in coming years. “I believe the landline phone will become extinct at some point,” he said. “But it may take another generation before that happens.”
Cellphones
Nearly all our survey respondents (98%) have mobile phones and 92% have smartphones. Most of the cellphone users (78%) feel the phones make them feel more connected to family and friends.
But they use the phones for much more than just talking. “I use my smartphone for just about everything related to communication,” said one survey respondent.
More than three-quarters of them said they do the following with the phones: read and send email; take photos; get driving directions and read news and information. Roughly 50% go on Facebook and other social networks with their phones. About a third use their phones to listen to audio and podcasts; watch videos; make or receive video calls and play games. But just 17% said their phones help them keep up with sports.
Some customers had gripes, though.
“With my aging eyes, it’s often hard to read content on my cellphone,” said one. “I live in a rural area and improvements to cellular and internet service is happening at a snail’s pace or non-existent,” said another.
The cellphone users were largely fine with the cost and quality of their providers’ service. Their average monthly cellphone bill is $54, which is quite a bit less than the national average of $73 a month. And only 49% felt their cellphone bills were costlier than they should be.
A striking 75% of Next Avenue cellphone users surveyed said they were pleased with their wireless providers. As it turns out, that’s identical to the general public. In the 2018-2019 American Customer Satisfaction Index’s (ACSI) Wireless Service and Cellular Telephone Report, the customer satisfaction score was 75 out of 100.
Little wonder, then, that 67% of respondents are extremely loyal, having been with their current wireless provider for five years or longer.
When our readers were asked to rate wireless service providers for network reliability and customer service, Verizon came out on top — 37% rated it above average.
In the ACSI survey, Verizon Wireless also led its category of wireless providers for network quality. T-Mobile was tops in customer satisfaction among mobile network operators; Consumer Cellular was tops for consumer satisfaction among value mobile virtual network operators and Cricket Wireless led among full-service mobile virtual network operators.
Cable Television and Streaming Services
The vast majority of our survey respondents said they access television content in their home either though a cable or satellite service (70%) or a streaming service such as Netflix, Hulu or PBS Passport (57%). Just 20% have an over-the-air antenna and a bare 4% don’t watch television content.
Netflix and Amazon Prime were especially popular; just over 60% of respondents pay for those digital services. Some 38% pay for news sites. But 10% or fewer subscribe to digital services for music and audiobooks, like Pandora, Spotify and Audible.
Like many Americans, however, some of our readers wish their cable companies would give them more control over which cable channels they could receive. “The greatest dissatisfaction I have about cable service,” said one, “is that I cannot choose the channels I will watch.”


Our Readers Sound Off on Phones, Cable and Streaming

Richard Eisenberg

(Editor's note: This article previously appeared on Make Aging Work.)
A Certified Financial Planner friend of mine shared a story over breakfast recently. One of his long-standing clients — let’s call him Jack —  who had fully retired six months earlier, called out of the blue with a plea for help. Having entered his retirement in great financial shape, his call went something like this: “John, you’ve got to help me.  I’ve got to go back to work doing something.  I’m going crazy not having something important to do.”
A ‘Bored Boomer’ Retiree
Jack appears to be another captive of an irrelevant retirement model — a casualty of an off-the-cliff leap from labor-to-leisure, vocation-to-vacation. An emerging rebel against the archaic, politically-inspired artificial finish line called traditional retirement.
Seventy-eight million strong and hitting this artificial finish line of 65 at the rate of 10,000 per day, boomers everywhere are beginning to discover that retirement, as we’ve known it for decades, needs redefining.
A 2016 Federal Reserve Study revealed that a full one-third of retirees eventually reconsider retirement and return to work on either a full or part-time basis. Another study published in 2017 by the Rand Corporation revealed that 39 percent of workers 65 or older who were currently employed had retired for a period but decided to return to the workplace.
A share of this trend can be attributed to the fact that two out of three retirees enter retirement having given little or no thought to the non-financial components of retirement life, only to discover that those “soft side” elements play a much larger role in retirement than the “hard-side” financial elements where the major planning effort is typically focused leading up to retirement.
Unfortunately, this discovery often comes later than it should.
Much of early, prime-time retirement is wasted as a result of this lack of non-financial planning. New retirees typically experience a one- to five-year retirement honeymoon period, during which the mental, social, physical and spiritual challenges emerge that were never discussed or planned for in the offices of their financial planner.
Issues such as:
Overcoming a loss of identityDivergent post-retirement interests between spousesBoredom due to lack of challenge and social engagementDepression and physical deterioration because of reduced activity and social interaction and lack of a sense of purposeSo here are three suggestions to help you avoid becoming a “bored boomer” in retirement:
No. 1: Unmuzzzle Your ‘Essential Self’
What was your 6-, 8-, or 10-year-old-self good at, passionate about, naturally drawn to and undeterred in pursuing before parents, peers and professors tamped it all down and out? There are clues to your essential self in all of that.
In her seminal book “Finding Your Own North Star, Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live”, Martha Beck reminds us that most people are “responsible citizens who have muzzled their essential selves in order to do what they believe is the ‘right thing.”
For most of us that “right thing” has been 30 to 40 years of cubicle nation, building someone else’s dream and believing that a fuzzily-defined, nirvanic, rewarding escape waiting at the end will be worth it.
For some, the “right thing” is in step with the “essential self.” For most, not so much. Why else would we covet getting away from it and give up or withdraw?  Which, by the way, is the definition of “retire.”
When the “right thing” goes away or morphs into that “rewarding escape,” we can find ourselves face-to-face with that uncomfortable question: Who am I and why am I here?
There it is — the perfect mental launching pad for resurrecting what really lit you up before social expectations locked you down.
I’m slower than most. I chased the “right thing” across four industries for over three decades and traveled deep into my sixties before finally unmuzzling my essential self and honoring my bent toward writing and teaching/coaching.
A couple of retired friends of mine are integrating their essential selves, passions and natural and acquired skills, leveraging them back into the marketplace where they will continue to do good.
One retired hospital CEO in Missouri is choosing to broaden and deepen his passion for civic and community involvement through board-level positions to pay forward his executive administrative experience as well as satisfy a passion to serve. To satisfy another passion, he builds and refurbishes black-powder, muzzle-loader rifles.
A retired nurse executive friend is taking her doctorate in nursing and decades of top-level nurse management experience back into the marketplace to help nurses cope with the pressures of today’s broken health care system and be more caring patient advocates. She’s doing it through a childhood passion for writing and teaching, using the internet, social media and book publishing.
No. 2: Reintegrate Yourself
I was tempted to suggest reinvent instead of reintegrate. The idea of reinvention is omnipresent these days, especially in the self-help world and particularly when it comes to those of us in the second half of life. Retirement itself has become a deserving target of reinvention.
But I was persuaded to reject reinvention in favor or reintegration after considering the views of Marc Freedman, CEO and President of Encore.org and one of the nation’s leading experts on the longevity revolution. In his Harvard Business Review article, “The Dangerous Myth of Reinvention,” Freedman made the point that reinvention is too daunting and not practical because it infers discarding accumulated life experience and starting over from scratch.
He wrote: “Isn’t there something to be said for racking up decades of know-how and lessons, from failures as well as triumphs? Shouldn’t we aspire to build on that wisdom and understanding? After years studying social innovators in the second half of life — individuals who have done their greatest work after 50 —I’m convinced the most powerful pattern that emerges from their stories can be described as reintegration, not reinvention. These successful late-blooming entrepreneurs weave together accumulated knowledge with creativity, while balancing continuity with change, in crafting a new idea that’s almost always deeply rooted in earlier chapters and activities.”
Reintegration dovetails nicely with point No.1. Combining accumulated skills and life experiences with a forgotten or long-suppressed passion won’t give boredom a foothold. And it lifts away the intimidating idea of a reinvention.
More and more boomers are finding this to be a path to an energizing, inspirational second career in which income, new meaning and contribution and service intersect.
No. 3: Start a Lifestyle Business
Can you imagine a greater boredom antidote than taking No, 1 and No. 2 and putting them together into a lifestyle business?
A lifestyle business has three components:
A level of income that you desire in your lifeTime freedom; work when you want, as much as you wantLocation independenceBut, you may be thinking, isn’t starting a business at this age too risky? Actually, new entrepreneurs age 55 to 64 comprised 25 percent of new businesses started in 2016, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurship. And according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the self-employment rate among workers 65 and older (who don’t incorporate) is the highest of any age group in America: 15.5 percent. In sharp contrast, it’s 4.1 percent for ages 25 to 34.
Consider this: Boomers with experience have an entrepreneurial edge in today’s knowledge-based economy. And start-up costs and risk levels have been mitigated like never before by digital technology.
Still skeptical? Miles Beckler,  an internet marketing and entrepreneurship guru (and apparent Gen X’er) has 10 ideas for lifestyle businesses to prime your thinking pump:
Information productsBecome an authorAffiliate marketingPrint on demand (like t-shirts, fine art, coffee mugs, a virtual store with no inventory or photography/online gallery); pairs well with Facebook marketingSelling services, like WordPress training, hosting, web design, graphics services and copywritingDrop shipping; selling other people’s products without owning inventoryFulfillment by Amazon — you find products, send them to Amazon and Amazon does the fulfillmentCoaching and consultingSelling advertisingSoftware as a Service (or SAAS)This list barely scratches the surface of the types of businesses being started by enterprising — and formerly bored — boomers.


How to Avoid Becoming a 'Bored Boomer' in Retirement

Gary Foster

The brainiacs at the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) offer physicians in various specialties a product called “Journal Watch,” which provides updates on the newest information and research from medical journals. Here’s a brief summary of what NEJM Journal Watch General Medicine thought were the most important medical stories of 2016 and why those stories matter to you:
Prince and the Opioid Crisis
In my home state of Minnesota, our beloved Prince died from an overdose of fentanyl, a narcotic he was reportedly using for a severely arthritic hip. Although Prince was truly one of a kind, he joined 90 other Americans who die every day from a prescription narcotic or heroin overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Here in the U.S., if a statistic involves narcotics, the number is going up. Since 1999, sales of prescription opioids and deaths from opioids have both quadrupled. Heroin use is up, and heroin-related deaths tripled from 2010 to 2015.
As sad as all that it is, opioids don’t really work — for acute pain, yes, but not for chronic pain, which is where most of these opioids are being used. You’re saying, “Why don’t doctors stop prescribing them if they are ineffectual and potentially lethal?” and I am saying, “I have no idea.”
SIRS Dropped for SOFA (Septic Shock)
The field of medicine is FULL (Fairly Unlimited LoL) of acronyms, but I’ll make this SIMPLE (So Intuitive Minded PLEase). A task force of intensive care unit doctors decided to swap SIRS (Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome) for SOFA (Sequential Organ FAilure).
When an infection turns bad, really bad, blood pressure drops and organs begin to fail. This process — what we call “septic shock” — has a certain amount of momentum. Early recognition and treatment of a looming and potentially serious infection can turn things around, but delays can lead to what quite literally can become a death spiral. Hopefully the new SOFA guidelines, which accompanied the acronym change, will improve the treatment of serious infections and save lives. [As Next Avenue wrote, actress Patti Duke died of sepsis last year; septic shock is the most severe form of septis.]
Overdoing It on the Oxygen
Many patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) use oxygen to improve their oxygen levels, and since we all need oxygen to live, shouldn’t more be better, particularly if one is low to begin with?
A multi-center U.S. trial found no benefit for home oxygen use in COPD patients with mildly to moderately decreased oxygen levels. And an Italian study found that goosing oxygen levels up to 97 to 100 percent in critically ill patients only increased their mortality risk. Shucks. For reference, a normal oxygen level is somewhere between 95 and 100 percent, with older folks tending to be on the lower side of that (yes, the lungs get older too).
CPAP and Cardiovascular Events
Obstructive sleep apnea occurs when the muscles of the upper airway relax during sleep, to the point where they can close off the airway. Carbon dioxide levels subsequently rise, rousing these patients awake and thereby temporarily correcting the problem — until they fall back to sleep.
A pressurized mask therapy (continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP) can help keep the airway open and restore normal, restful sleep. Patients with obstructive sleep apnea are at increased risk for heart attacks and strokes, and the use of a pressurized CPAP mask has always been felt to lower that risk.
Two 2016 studies cast doubt on that particular benefit — although both studies were weakened by the fact that some patients had a hard time tolerating the mask. The average CPAP usage in one of the studies was just 3.3 hours per night, and like a raincoat, it can’t work if you’re not wearing it.
Rethinking Fainting Episodes
The most common reason why people suddenly pass out is a rapid drop in blood pressure, or pulse, or both. As dramatic as passing out can be, often the event is of little consequence, particularly for younger patients; with a little education, the person who faints can become better aware of the circumstances and warning signs leading up to the event, and avoid a repeat episode.
But an Italian study found that 17 percent of older adults (with a mean age of 76) hospitalized for their first syncopal (fainting) event had suffered a pulmonary embolism. That’s where a blood clot from the leg veins breaks loose and flows back to the heart, plugging the pulmonary artery, which brings blood to the lungs. Chest pain and shortness of breath are common symptoms of a pulmonary embolism; prior to this study, passing out was thought to be rarely triggered by a pulmonary embolism.
Take-home lesson: if you’re older and pass out for the first time, ask your emergency room doctor to consider a pulmonary embolism — and to maybe order a D-Dimer level and a Wells score. They’ll know what you’re talking about, even if you don’t.
Prostate Cancer Treatment Still Controversial
Most men who live long enough will develop prostate cancer, but what kind? The kind that spreads out from the prostate gland and eventually becomes lethal? Or the more common, slow-growing kind, which stays confined to the prostate and can only be detected by a urologist with a biopsy needle, or by a pathologist at autopsy — that is, after some other disease process has claimed the top line on the death certificate?
The “Protec T” trial in the U.K. randomized 1,600 men age 50 to 69 with low-grade prostate cancer to either surgical removal of the prostate, a combination of radiation therapy and drugs to deprive the cancer (and the rest of the body) of testosterone, or to surveillance with a PSA blood test every three to six months.
A decade later, half of the men in the surveillance group ended up getting surgery or radiation because their PSA was on the rise. Widespread (“metastatic”) prostate cancer occurred infrequently, but was more common with surveillance (6.1 percent) and less common with radiation (2.9 percent) or surgery (2.4 percent). Think about those numbers: in 2.4 percent of cases where physicians concluded that the cancer was low grade and isolated to the prostate gland, surgical removal of the prostate cancer did not provide a cure because, on a microscopic level not detectable by current testing methods, the cancer had already left the prostate gland.
Opting for treatment sounds like a no-brainer until one considers treatment risks and side effects, and the fact that all three groups had the same overall mortality rate (10 percent) and the same chance of dying of prostate cancer (1 percent).
For any individual, it is hard to make sense of all the risks and odds, so be sure to take your bookie with you when you talk with your physician about prostate cancer screening.
New Diabetic Drugs Lower Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke
Insulin is the most well-known treatment for diabetes, but there are a host of other drugs — some in pill form, some injectable — that can improve blood sugar levels. Poorly controlled diabetes makes people feel bad, but it also leads to premature cardiovascular disease such as strokes and heart attacks.
For unclear reasons, some diabetic treatments improve blood sugars but don’t reduce cardiovascular disease. Two newer diabetic drugs — liraglutide and empagliflozin — were shown to reduce the risk of dying from a stroke or heart attack in diabetic patients at high risk for such.
But the drugs are — you guessed it, expen$$$$ive — and although everyone who takes the medications will see their blood sugar control improve, not everyone will see a cardiovascular benefit. In fact, a fairly high number of patients have to be taking these drugs in order to prevent a stroke or heart attack in one individual, which only adds to their overall cost. Here’s another fiscally rooted area in which President Trump can intervene and make something beautiful or “yuge” happen.
Zika, Zika, Zika
Have you heard of it? Most Zika virus infections are so mild as to cause no symptoms, and serious illness or death are very rare. But nothing digs deeper into our fear psyche than a mosquito-borne virus that can infect expectant mothers and cause neurological birth defects. So much so that even dysfunctional Congress, after only eight months of deep contemplation, was able to sign a bill appropriating $1.1 billion to fight the virus.
The first two trimesters of pregnancy are the riskiest time for Zika infection, because that’s when the fetal brain is most actively developing. The virus can be sexually transmitted, and it can persist in semen for months, so Deep Woods Off can’t help you there.
Black End-of-Life Matters
Several 2016 studies added to previous studies showing that black patients receive more aggressive medical treatment than whites as they near the end of life. And that’s probably not a good thing, as Americans have come to better understand that a “do everything, no matter what” approach for the dying and threadbare elderly is not only futile, but it can unnecessarily promote suffering.
Misplaced empathy (we don’t want them to die — but that’s not the question we get to answer) can prolong the death process, and it can increase the chance that a dying loved one will spend the last few weeks (or months) of their life in a hospital, mortally exhausted, in pain and surrounded by hospital staff rather than family members.
I will stick my neck out here and suggest that the reasons for the disparity are likely “multi-factorial.” As a hospital-based physician (and as a son, and then also as a brother), I have been involved in a lot of these end-of-life discussions. They can be very complex and nuanced.
They are heart-wrenching: patients and family members are trying to communicate their deepest thoughts and often unspoken wishes, and cultural/social differences — even subtle ones — can loom large. Patients and family members who have come to feel that The System is against them can easily interpret any suggestion of withdrawing care as a question of worthiness rather than compassion, and who can blame them?
We’ve got work to do.
 


The Top Medical Stories of 2016

Dr. Craig Bowron

After reviewing six recent surveys and studies from financial services firms and the U.S. government, I’ve decided that Americans’ position on retirement planning can be summed up in, well not a word exactly, but an emoji: The Shruggie. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, people believe there’s a national retirement crisis — though they say they’re not having one personally, Vanguard’s survey, “Retirement Transitions in Four Countries,” finds. When Vanguard queried 892 pre-retirees, 59 percent agreed that there’s a national retirement crisis but only 10 percent described their own retirement situation as a crisis.
Yet the research (from Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Bank of America Merrill Lynch/Age Wave, Bankers Life, the U.S. Census plus Vanguard) shows many Americans are, sadly, pretty clueless about how much money they’ll need for a comfortable retirement, how much they could withdraw in retirement to avoid outliving their savings and investing basics.
Average Retirement IQ Score: 30
In Fidelity Investments’ first Retirement IQ survey, “people didn’t do very well; the average score was about a 30,” out of a possible 100, said Ken Hevert, Fidelity’s senior vice president of retirement.
For example, about three-quarters of respondents (and four-fifths of those age 55 to 65) underestimated how much they’ll need to save for retirement. Although Fidelity said financial pros recommend people save at least 10 times their final year of pre-retirement income, most surveyed said they thought the rule-of-thumb was two to three times income just before retirement.
Similarly, the Bank of America Merrill Lynch/Age Wave survey found that 81 percent of people didn’t know how much money they’d need for retirement. And only 37 percent of middle-income boomers feel “well prepared or very well prepared” for retirement, according to a new Bankers Life Center for a Secure Retirement survey, “10 Years After the Crisis: Middle-Income Boomers Rebounding But Not Recovered.”
Few Are Actually Doing Retirement Planning
The reason so many don’t know how much they'll need — and granted, no one really knows — is that so few people bother to even estimate the figure. Vanguard’s survey said just 55 percent of pre-retirees have determined the amount of money they’ll need to retire. And even fewer — 43 percent — have planned for how they’ll generate retirement income.
Rick Moody, an expert on the power of dreams in retirement, recently told the Age Without Borders Virtual Summit: "We're really not prepared for retirement in the way high school prepared us to go to college or the way we get prepared to get married."
Fidelity found Americans haven't wrapped their heads around how long they're likely to live, either. When it asked: “Given the average life expectancy, if you want to retire at 65, about how long would you need your retirement savings to last?,” 38 percent of those age 55 to 65  said: between 12 and 17 years. The correct answer: 22 years.
Those extra years can mean more time to enjoy life and loved ones but also more years to cover your costs. Maybe that's why, in T. Rowe Price’s study, “Understanding Investor Attitudes Toward Retirement,” 59 percent of boomers called the longevity bonus (the idea that we could have an extra 30 years added to our lifespan) “both a blessing and a curse.”
Underestimating Health Care Costs in Retirement
One big cost people aren't being realistic about, Fidelity found, is health care. A striking 72 percent of Fidelity's survey respondents underestimated how much a couple retiring at 65 will likely spend on health care in retirement (correct answer: $260,000, not including any long-term care costs).
Worse: 19 percent of pre-retirees underestimated that figure by $200,000. You read that right.
“Many people assume everything will be covered by Medicare,” said Hevert, or that they’ll pay any health costs out of savings.
How Much Money to Withdraw in Retirement
Only 42 percent of pre-retirees Fidelity asked knew the percentage of savings that financial experts typically suggest you withdraw annually in retirement (that would be 4 to 5 percent). Worse, 38 percent of those over 55 said they could withdraw 7 percent or more a year. Withdrawing that much, Fidelity says, could put “many at risk of quickly running out of savings in retirement.”
Hevert suspects so many went with 7 percent because that’s roughly the average historical annual return in the stock market. In other words, people think their retirement savings will grow 7 percent a year, so they’ll be able to withdraw 7 percent without touching their principal — what Hevert calls “the holy grail.”
But the thing about averages: they’re averages. Some years, the stock market has risen much less than 7 percent or, of course, fallen. Other years, it’s gone up by more than 7 percent.
“We [in the financial services industry and the media] need to do a much better job helping people understand what reasonable withdrawal approaches can be,” says Hevert.
I agree.
Asking Too Much of People?
Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, spoke at an Aspen Institute program I just attended on why retirement tax incentives aren’t getting people to save enough. “We are asking people to be financial advisers. But we don’t ask people to operate on themselves," she said. "They go to a doctor.”
Morrissey thinks Americans are being wrongly blamed for not understanding how to save for retirement wisely — “something that is highly complex.”
Indeed, NYU law professor David Kamin told the Aspen Institute that the retirement tax incentive system “is not working well” — half of Americans don’t participate in employer-sponsored retirement plans or IRAs and, he added, 60 percent of the benefits of the retirement tax breaks now go to the top quintile of the population. A recent U.S. Census study said only 14 percent of employers offer retirement plans.
“Current tax incentives are mistargeted, complicated and too easily manipulated,” notes Kamin. What could get more people to save and what could get people to save more?
How to Get More People to Save for Retirement
Kamin has three recommendations:
1. Refocus retirement-saving tax breaks toward low- and middle-income Americans One write-off aimed at those people — The Saver’s Credit — is greatly underutilized, said Aspen Institute panelist Catherine Collinson, of the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies. Only 7.9 million tax filers claimed the credit in 2014, at an average amount of just $175. Collinson estimates that nearly 30 million are eligible for this credit, which offers tax savings of up to $1,000; $2,000 if you’re married and filing jointly.
A couple of reasons why so few people take The Saver’s Credit: “Only one in three workers are aware of it,” says Collinson. “And you can’t claim it on the 1040 EZ form.”
2. Increase portability of retirement savings plans Some retirement analysts favor a universal retirement account that you could easily take with you from one employer to another.
3. Raise the “default” savings rate in employer-sponsored retirement plans The default rate is the percentage of pay some employers automatically withhold for 401(k)s and it’s often just 3 percent or so.
I think all three of those ideas sound like good ones for policymakers and employers to adopt. In the meantime, I’d love to see American workers make a change, too: start getting serious about retirement planning while you still have time.
Next Avenue Editors Also Recommend:
How Washington Is Eroding Retirement Security
Could the Retirement Crisis Be Overblown?
The Big Retirement Planning Lesson of 2016








Americans' Position on Retirement Planning: The Shruggie

Imagine that you just received a call from a colleague asking if you’d consider leaving your longtime job to go work for her startup. The offer includes equity ownership, a VP title and the promise of a big payday down the road. You love your job, but this sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
What do you do?
While this scenario is fictitious, the need to make tough career decisions is anything but. Sometimes — by asking smart questions, doing research, weighing options and talking things over with trusted advisers — we can reach decisions quickly. But other times, no matter how much we analyze, ponder and ruminate, the right answer remains elusive.
In my work as a career coach, I’ve found that when coming up with that right answer is tough, an online decision-making tool can prove invaluable.
Decision-making tools add a layer of objectivity, structure and (sometimes) quantitative analysis that thinking alone can’t provide. And you can now easily download free templates for them online.
The fact of the matter is that whether you’re looking to shift careers, change jobs or make a decision to retire early, there often is no one “right” answer. But by using a tool that helps you methodically evaluate your options, you’ll feel more confident that your decision is sound.
So the next time you’re struggling to break through a mental logjam, here are four tools to consider:
1. Decision Matrix (also known as the Pugh Method)
A basic decision matrix uses a scoring template to systematically evaluate all the factors and criteria used when making a decision. You then arrive at a final score to reveal which option is best. The quantitative nature of this tool helps remove the subjectivity from the decision process.
You’ll need to create a chart with the alternative decisions listed as rows and the relevant factors affecting the decisions as columns. For example, if you want to choose between staying in your current role or accepting a higher-paying transfer, list those two decisions as rows. The factors impacting those choices, such as salary, work hours and growth potential, would be listed as columns.
Then, assign a rating value to each of the factors under consideration for each option. In this example, you might assign salary a “7” if you stay in your current job but an “8” for a transfer (since the transfer would involve a slight pay increase). After you give each factor a score, add up the total score for each option. The option with the highest score indicates the best decision.
Where to find templates online: MindTools.com
2. The Futures Wheel
This is a simple visual tool that helps you brainstorm possible negative and positive consequences involved with a decision. You write the change under consideration in a circle in the middle of the page, with the direct consequences of that decision positioned in a circle around it. Then, the circle grows outward for second-level, third-level and fourth-level consequences, and so on.
As an example, say you are considering early retirement (center circle). An implication of that decision might include a loss of health insurance (first-level consequence), which means you’ll need to research alternatives (second-level consequence) which could result in an extra monthly expense for coverage (third-level consequence). At the same time, taking early retirement will also mean you’ll have an extra 30 hours a week (first-level consequence) that you could fill with fun activities like travel, volunteering or hobbies (second-level consequences) that have both benefits and costs (third and fourth-level consequences).
Try building separate futures wheels for each option under consideration. So sticking with this example, you might build one wheel for early retirement, one for staying at your current job and one for a phased retirement option. Then, you can compare each of the wheels and see which option offers the most appealing outcomes.
Where to find templates online: Global Education.edu
3. Personal SWOT analysis
SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Originally developed in the 60s for business applications, a SWOT chart is an equally useful tool for individuals contemplating a career or job change.
By comparing your strengths and weaknesses to the requirements of the job, you will be able to better assess your viability as a candidate and work on areas that need attention.
Let’s say you’re considering making a shift into an encore career as a teacher from your current job as an accountant. Here are some of the questions you might ask for each of the four SWOT areas:
Strengths:
Which of your corporate skills would be most attractive in a teaching environment?
Will your volunteer experience as a literacy tutor give you a leg up over the competition?
Weaknesses:
How long will it take to get the needed credentials for this job?
Do you have the physical stamina to shift into a job where you need to be on your feet most of the day?
Opportunities:
Which schools are receptive to older teachers?
Which subjects or grades appear to have the most openings?
Threats:
Which new technologies do you need to learn to succeed at this position?
How much competition will you face for this job?
Where to find templates online: Businessballs.com
4. T-chart (aka pro and con chart)
A T-chart is a graphic organizer that lets you list and examine the pros and cons of any decision. I know this sounds ridiculously simplistic (and it is), but I’ve been amazed by the number of times I’ve seen my clients successfully use this basic tool to break a tie between two options.
It’s a quick, but surprisingly effective, fix — especially if you’re reluctant to try anything more complex.
Where to find templates online: You can just do a Google search for them. But it’s also easy to just grab a sheet of paper, write the decision topic at the top, put a line down the middle and list the pros in one column and the cons in the other.
One last tip: While I’m a big fan of these tools, keep in mind that little actions like taking a brisk walk, journaling or simply “giving it time” can work as well as anything to strengthen your decision-making muscle.


4 Ways to Help You Make a Tough Career Decision

Nancy Collamer

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