If You Don't Have Your Health...

...Then You Won't Have A Retirement

A few years ago, I wrote a book called 70 and Strong. I published under a pen name – Will Anderson. I wrote the book when I was 69 because I realized, being the clever guy that I am, that there were millions of other baby boomers turning 70 somewhere. And we all needed some level of advice on staying healthy and strong.

Now, this isn’t a pitch to boost sales but to make a couple of points.

The first is quite obvious; everyone - from naturopaths, to chiropractors, to gerontologists to fitness instructors - says the same thing: it’s important to exercise because to NOT exercise is to go backwards in all sorts of ways.

The type and frequency of “exercise” that older people are encouraged to do varies because, hey, we’re not all the same nor can we all do the same level of exercise.

For some, walking is all they are capable of doing, so the common advice is to walk several miles a day. You can do this on a treadmill if the weather’s bad. Personally, I find treadmills as boring as exercise bikes. There’s a lot of motion but the scenery never changes.

So, why walking? It’s good for the joints, especially the hip joints. It’s good for the heart and it’s good for the lungs. What’s not to love?

Another area that gets a lot of attention is strength training and this may be even more significant than walking. Lifting weights is critical to maintaining muscle mass and strength, both of which go into reverse as we age.

There is a practical benefit to weight training, too. If an older person falls, they need the strength to be able to push themselves back into a standing position. I know a lady who  was crossing a street in Vancouver and tripped on a streetcar track. She fell flat but didn’t have the strength to get up. Others had to come to her rescue and assist her back to a standing position. She wasn’t hurt. She just didn’t have any strength in her body. She was only about 70 at the time. She never exercised.

The final area of import is as obvious as the previous two and that’s to maintain a decent diet. I think we all know what that means because, at the end of the day, we’re not stupid. There is more than enough information online about good diet when you’re older so there’s little point in being repetitive here.

But here’s the second point I want to make that may not seem to relate to fitness and diet, at all. At least, not at first blush.

It’s about retirement savings. Having enough money in retirement.

When I was a financial advisor for 9 years, I focused a lot of my time and energy counselling clients about saving for retirement and protecting assets during the working, earning years, investing wisely to build up their funds so the day they decided to stop working, they’d be okay for many years of what would hopefully be a long, healthy retirement.

This was the common thinking in the investment community at the time. Accumulate and then de-cumulate (draw down the retirement savings).

As we know, stock markets are fickle, GICs and CDs often fail to pay enough interest to beat inflation and the level of financial knowledge possessed by the general public is pretty poor. Many people also lack the discipline to set aside the 10% of monthly income that is a yardstick used for sensible retirement saving.

There’s also something else that I came to realize during those nine years dishing out nuggets of financial wisdom: there are those who don’t want to retire at all. They are the lucky few who love what they do and intend to do it well into their 70s or 80s. I’m one of them.

But there are far too many others who don’t want to retire because they can’t. They can’t afford to stop an income stream that is always going to be larger than a pension or social security payment. And how many Americans or Canadians, these days, have a company pension at all, let alone a defined benefit pension which ensures that you know how much you will receive when you retire? Those “golden eggs” are as rare as Unicorns.

During the pandemic, when unemployment could have skyrocketed, the Biden Administration rolled out a masterful plan to pay people who were unable to work due to the lockdowns and reimburse businesses to avoid mass layoffs.

The plan worked and when the pandemic ended, the American consumer – the backbone of the U.S. economy – came roaring back. Very soon, the pandemic checks that Americans stuffed into their bank accounts were circulating through the economy again, and today, the savings rate has returned to “normal” levels, credit card debt is jumping, car loan defaults are skyrocketing and the visions of early – or any retirement – are gone.

That’s why today, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, 40% of American households won’t be able to maintain their standard of living in retirement.

Worse than that, the same study indicates that one-third of Americans still working at ages 62 to 70 can’t afford to retire at all.

So, are you starting to join the dots, here? Staying healthy and fit is your key to being physically able to continue working, whether you want to or have to. Remember that old saying, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.”