This is an interesting exhibit showcasing the actual human body which has shown across the United States, receiving much attention. For more information, click on the link:
http://www.kitv.com/health/16593397/detail.html
Friday, June 13, 2008
Japan and dieting
June 13, 2008 By NORIMITSU ONISHI
AMAGASAKI, Japan — Japan, a country not known for its overweight people, has undertaken one of the most ambitious campaigns ever by a nation to slim down its citizenry.
Summoned by the city of Amagasaki one recent morning, Minoru Nogiri, 45, a flower shop owner, found himself lining up to have his waistline measured. With no visible paunch, he seemed to run little risk of being classified as overweight, or metabo, the preferred word in Japan these days.
But because the new state-prescribed limit for male waistlines is a strict 33.5 inches, he had anxiously measured himself at home a couple of days earlier. “I’m on the border,” he said.
Under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must now measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups. That represents more than 56 million waistlines, or about 44 percent of the entire population.
Those exceeding government limits — 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, which are identical to thresholds established in 2005 for Japan by the International Diabetes Federation as an easy guideline for identifying health risks — and having a weight-related ailment will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight. If necessary, those people will be steered toward further re-education after six more months.
To reach its goals of shrinking the overweight population by 10 percent over the next four years and 25 percent over the next seven years, the government will impose financial penalties on companies and local governments that fail to meet specific targets. The country’s Ministry of Health argues that the campaign will keep the spread of diseases like diabetes and strokes in check.
The ministry also says that curbing widening waistlines will rein in a rapidly aging society’s ballooning health care costs, one of the most serious and politically delicate problems facing Japan today. Most Japanese are covered under public health care or through their work. Anger over a plan that would make those 75 and older pay more for health care brought a parliamentary censure motion Wednesday against Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, the first against a prime minister in the country’s postwar history.
But critics say that the government guidelines — especially the one about male waistlines — are simply too strict and that more than half of all men will be considered overweight. The effect, they say, will be to encourage overmedication and ultimately raise health care costs.
Yoichi Ogushi, a professor at Tokai University’s School of Medicine near Tokyo and an expert on public health, said that there was “no need at all” for the Japanese to lose weight.
“I don’t think the campaign will have any positive effect. Now if you did this in the United States, there would be benefits, since there are many Americans who weigh more than 100 kilograms,” or about 220 pounds, Mr. Ogushi said. “But the Japanese are so slender that they can’t afford to lose weight.”
Mr. Ogushi was actually a little harder on Americans than they deserved. A survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that the average waist size for Caucasian American men was 39 inches, a full inch lower than the 40-inch threshold established by the International Diabetes Federation. American women did not fare as well, with an average waist size of 36.5 inches, about two inches above their threshold of 34.6 inches. The differences in thresholds reflected variations in height and body type from Japanese men and women.
Comparable figures for the Japanese are sketchy since waistlines have not been measured officially in the past. But private research on thousands of Japanese indicates that the average male waistline falls just below the new government limit.
That fact, widely reported in the media, has heightened the anxiety in the nation’s health clinics.
In Amagasaki, a city in western Japan, officials have moved aggressively to measure waistlines in what the government calls special checkups. The city had to measure at least 65 percent of the 40- to 74-year-olds covered by public health insurance, an “extremely difficult” goal, acknowledged Midori Noguchi, a city official.
When his turn came, Mr. Nogiri, the flower shop owner, entered a booth where he bared his midriff, exposing a flat stomach with barely discernible love handles. A nurse wrapped a tape measure around his waist across his belly button: 33.6 inches, or 0.1 inch over the limit.
“Strikeout,” he said, defeat spreading across his face.
The campaign started a couple of years ago when the Health Ministry began beating the drums for a medical condition that few Japanese had ever heard of — metabolic syndrome — a collection of factors that heighten the risk of developing vascular disease and diabetes. Those include abdominal obesity, high blood pressure and high levels of blood glucose and cholesterol. In no time, the scary-sounding condition was popularly shortened to the funny-sounding metabo, and it has become the nation’s shorthand for overweight.
The mayor of one town in Mie, a prefecture near here, became so wrapped up in the anti-metabo campaign that he and six other town officials formed a weight-loss group called “The Seven Metabo Samurai.” That campaign ended abruptly after a 47-year-old member with a 39-inch waistline died of a heart attack while jogging.
Still, at a city gym in Amagasaki recently, dozens of residents — few of whom appeared overweight — danced to the city’s anti-metabo song, which warned against trouser buttons popping and flying away, “pyun-pyun-pyun!”
“Goodbye, metabolic. Let’s get our checkups together. Go! Go! Go!
Goodbye, metabolic. Don’t wait till you get sick. No! No! No!”
The word metabo has made it easier for health care providers to urge their patients to lose weight, said Dr. Yoshikuni Sakamoto, a physician in the employee health insurance union at Matsushita, which makes Panasonic products.
“Before we had to broach the issue with the word obesity, which definitely has a negative image,” Dr. Sakamoto said. “But metabo sounds much more inclusive.”
Even before Tokyo’s directives, Matsushita had focused on its employees’ weight during annual checkups. Last summer, Akio Inoue, 30, an engineer carrying 238 pounds on a 5-foot-7 frame, was told by a company doctor to lose weight or take medication for his high blood pressure. After dieting, he was down to 182 pounds, but his waistline was still more than one inch over the state-approved limit.
With the new law, Matsushita has to measure the waistlines of not only its employees but also of their families and retirees. As part of its intensifying efforts, the company has started giving its employees “metabo check” towels that double as tape measures.
“Nobody will want to be singled out as metabo,” Kimiko Shigeno, a company nurse, said of the campaign. “It’ll have the same effect as non-smoking campaigns where smokers are now looked at disapprovingly.”
Companies like Matsushita must measure the waistlines of at least 80 percent of their employees. Furthermore, they must get 10 percent of those deemed metabolic to lose weight by 2012, and 25 percent of them to lose weight by 2015.
NEC, Japan’s largest maker of personal computers, said that if it failed to meet its targets, it could incur as much as $19 million in penalties. The company has decided to nip metabo in the bud by starting to measure the waistlines of all its employees over 30 years old and by sponsoring metabo education days for the employees’ families.
Some experts say the government’s guidelines on everything from waistlines to blood pressure are so strict that meeting, or exceeding, those targets will be impossible. They say that the government’s real goal is to shift health care costs onto the private sector.
Dr. Minoru Yamakado, an official at the Japan Society of Ningen Dock, an association of doctors who administer physical exams, said he endorsed the government’s campaign and its focus on preventive medicine.
But he said that the government’s real priority should be to reduce smoking rates, which remain among the highest among advanced nations, in large part because of Japan’s powerful tobacco lobby.
“Smoking is even one of the causes of metabolic syndrome,” he said. “So if you’re worried about metabo, stopping people from smoking should be your top priority.”
Despite misgivings, though, Japan is pushing ahead.
Kizashi Ohama, an official in Matsuyama, a city that has also acted aggressively against metabo, said he would leave the debate over the campaign’s merits to experts and health officials in Tokyo.
At Matsuyama’s public health clinic, Kinichiro Ichikawa, 62, said the government-approved 33.5-inch male waistline was “severe.” He is 5-foot-4, weighs only 134 pounds and knows no one who is overweight.
“Japan shouldn’t be making such a fuss about this,” he said before going off to have his waistline measured.
But on a shopping strip here, Kenzo Nagata, 73, a toy store owner, said he had ignored a letter summoning him to a so-called special checkup. His waistline was no one’s business but his own, he said, though he volunteered that, at 32.7 inches, it fell safely below the limit. He planned to disregard the second notice that the city was scheduled to mail to the recalcitrant.
“I’m not going,” he said. “I don’t think that concerns me.”
New York Times
AMAGASAKI, Japan — Japan, a country not known for its overweight people, has undertaken one of the most ambitious campaigns ever by a nation to slim down its citizenry.
Summoned by the city of Amagasaki one recent morning, Minoru Nogiri, 45, a flower shop owner, found himself lining up to have his waistline measured. With no visible paunch, he seemed to run little risk of being classified as overweight, or metabo, the preferred word in Japan these days.
But because the new state-prescribed limit for male waistlines is a strict 33.5 inches, he had anxiously measured himself at home a couple of days earlier. “I’m on the border,” he said.
Under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must now measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups. That represents more than 56 million waistlines, or about 44 percent of the entire population.
Those exceeding government limits — 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, which are identical to thresholds established in 2005 for Japan by the International Diabetes Federation as an easy guideline for identifying health risks — and having a weight-related ailment will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight. If necessary, those people will be steered toward further re-education after six more months.
To reach its goals of shrinking the overweight population by 10 percent over the next four years and 25 percent over the next seven years, the government will impose financial penalties on companies and local governments that fail to meet specific targets. The country’s Ministry of Health argues that the campaign will keep the spread of diseases like diabetes and strokes in check.
The ministry also says that curbing widening waistlines will rein in a rapidly aging society’s ballooning health care costs, one of the most serious and politically delicate problems facing Japan today. Most Japanese are covered under public health care or through their work. Anger over a plan that would make those 75 and older pay more for health care brought a parliamentary censure motion Wednesday against Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, the first against a prime minister in the country’s postwar history.
But critics say that the government guidelines — especially the one about male waistlines — are simply too strict and that more than half of all men will be considered overweight. The effect, they say, will be to encourage overmedication and ultimately raise health care costs.
Yoichi Ogushi, a professor at Tokai University’s School of Medicine near Tokyo and an expert on public health, said that there was “no need at all” for the Japanese to lose weight.
“I don’t think the campaign will have any positive effect. Now if you did this in the United States, there would be benefits, since there are many Americans who weigh more than 100 kilograms,” or about 220 pounds, Mr. Ogushi said. “But the Japanese are so slender that they can’t afford to lose weight.”
Mr. Ogushi was actually a little harder on Americans than they deserved. A survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that the average waist size for Caucasian American men was 39 inches, a full inch lower than the 40-inch threshold established by the International Diabetes Federation. American women did not fare as well, with an average waist size of 36.5 inches, about two inches above their threshold of 34.6 inches. The differences in thresholds reflected variations in height and body type from Japanese men and women.
Comparable figures for the Japanese are sketchy since waistlines have not been measured officially in the past. But private research on thousands of Japanese indicates that the average male waistline falls just below the new government limit.
That fact, widely reported in the media, has heightened the anxiety in the nation’s health clinics.
In Amagasaki, a city in western Japan, officials have moved aggressively to measure waistlines in what the government calls special checkups. The city had to measure at least 65 percent of the 40- to 74-year-olds covered by public health insurance, an “extremely difficult” goal, acknowledged Midori Noguchi, a city official.
When his turn came, Mr. Nogiri, the flower shop owner, entered a booth where he bared his midriff, exposing a flat stomach with barely discernible love handles. A nurse wrapped a tape measure around his waist across his belly button: 33.6 inches, or 0.1 inch over the limit.
“Strikeout,” he said, defeat spreading across his face.
The campaign started a couple of years ago when the Health Ministry began beating the drums for a medical condition that few Japanese had ever heard of — metabolic syndrome — a collection of factors that heighten the risk of developing vascular disease and diabetes. Those include abdominal obesity, high blood pressure and high levels of blood glucose and cholesterol. In no time, the scary-sounding condition was popularly shortened to the funny-sounding metabo, and it has become the nation’s shorthand for overweight.
The mayor of one town in Mie, a prefecture near here, became so wrapped up in the anti-metabo campaign that he and six other town officials formed a weight-loss group called “The Seven Metabo Samurai.” That campaign ended abruptly after a 47-year-old member with a 39-inch waistline died of a heart attack while jogging.
Still, at a city gym in Amagasaki recently, dozens of residents — few of whom appeared overweight — danced to the city’s anti-metabo song, which warned against trouser buttons popping and flying away, “pyun-pyun-pyun!”
“Goodbye, metabolic. Let’s get our checkups together. Go! Go! Go!
Goodbye, metabolic. Don’t wait till you get sick. No! No! No!”
The word metabo has made it easier for health care providers to urge their patients to lose weight, said Dr. Yoshikuni Sakamoto, a physician in the employee health insurance union at Matsushita, which makes Panasonic products.
“Before we had to broach the issue with the word obesity, which definitely has a negative image,” Dr. Sakamoto said. “But metabo sounds much more inclusive.”
Even before Tokyo’s directives, Matsushita had focused on its employees’ weight during annual checkups. Last summer, Akio Inoue, 30, an engineer carrying 238 pounds on a 5-foot-7 frame, was told by a company doctor to lose weight or take medication for his high blood pressure. After dieting, he was down to 182 pounds, but his waistline was still more than one inch over the state-approved limit.
With the new law, Matsushita has to measure the waistlines of not only its employees but also of their families and retirees. As part of its intensifying efforts, the company has started giving its employees “metabo check” towels that double as tape measures.
“Nobody will want to be singled out as metabo,” Kimiko Shigeno, a company nurse, said of the campaign. “It’ll have the same effect as non-smoking campaigns where smokers are now looked at disapprovingly.”
Companies like Matsushita must measure the waistlines of at least 80 percent of their employees. Furthermore, they must get 10 percent of those deemed metabolic to lose weight by 2012, and 25 percent of them to lose weight by 2015.
NEC, Japan’s largest maker of personal computers, said that if it failed to meet its targets, it could incur as much as $19 million in penalties. The company has decided to nip metabo in the bud by starting to measure the waistlines of all its employees over 30 years old and by sponsoring metabo education days for the employees’ families.
Some experts say the government’s guidelines on everything from waistlines to blood pressure are so strict that meeting, or exceeding, those targets will be impossible. They say that the government’s real goal is to shift health care costs onto the private sector.
Dr. Minoru Yamakado, an official at the Japan Society of Ningen Dock, an association of doctors who administer physical exams, said he endorsed the government’s campaign and its focus on preventive medicine.
But he said that the government’s real priority should be to reduce smoking rates, which remain among the highest among advanced nations, in large part because of Japan’s powerful tobacco lobby.
“Smoking is even one of the causes of metabolic syndrome,” he said. “So if you’re worried about metabo, stopping people from smoking should be your top priority.”
Despite misgivings, though, Japan is pushing ahead.
Kizashi Ohama, an official in Matsuyama, a city that has also acted aggressively against metabo, said he would leave the debate over the campaign’s merits to experts and health officials in Tokyo.
At Matsuyama’s public health clinic, Kinichiro Ichikawa, 62, said the government-approved 33.5-inch male waistline was “severe.” He is 5-foot-4, weighs only 134 pounds and knows no one who is overweight.
“Japan shouldn’t be making such a fuss about this,” he said before going off to have his waistline measured.
But on a shopping strip here, Kenzo Nagata, 73, a toy store owner, said he had ignored a letter summoning him to a so-called special checkup. His waistline was no one’s business but his own, he said, though he volunteered that, at 32.7 inches, it fell safely below the limit. He planned to disregard the second notice that the city was scheduled to mail to the recalcitrant.
“I’m not going,” he said. “I don’t think that concerns me.”
New York Times
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Thinking of retiring? Don't make these mistakes
7 common retirement mistakes to avoid
By Suzanne McGee, MSN Money
Baby boomers will live different retirement lives than their parents did. But the advantages of adventurous travel and second careers have pitfalls, too.
There's no single formula that will produce a happy retirement for baby boomers. But there are ways to boost the odds you'll retire in bliss rather than misery, experts say.
"About half of today's retirees are really quite miserable in their post-retirement lives," psychologist and researcher Ken Dychtwald has concluded, based on 50,000-plus interviews he has done for his books on aging.
Those retirees end up unhappy because they are unable to adapt to the new retirement model, says Jim McCarthy, a managing director at Morgan Stanley. How to be happy after work ends
"We have tended to look at our lives as being linear and retirement as being the final stage that we enter," McCarthy says. "If you realize that you're not locked in to any one approach or model -- that having 20 or 30 years gives you a lot of time to test out new roles for yourself -- well, you've boosted the odds that you'll succeed at retirement."
Having both time and options is a plus for boomers. But it also "pushes them to think outside their routines, beyond their comfort zone," says Sri Reddy, the head of retirement-income strategies for ING, a financial-services company. "Perhaps the biggest challenge boomers will face is a challenge to their imagination." Quiz: Are you ready for retirement?
As boomers start to act on their imaginations, experts say, there will be common traps to watch out for. Here are the top seven:
1. Exiting before deciding on an encore. Retiring early may seem like a status symbol, signaling financial success. But that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, says McCarthy, even if you really hate your job.
"You're not ready to retire until you've decided what you're going to do for an encore," McCarthy says.
A retirement-life plan doesn't have to be carved in stone, but it should exist, says Fred Mandell, a former Ameriprise executive.
Mandell, for example, began crafting his plan at age 55, three years before he retired in 2001.
"Once I began thinking about the future, I realized I didn't know what that would involve, and I drew up a kind of business plan around what I thought I might want to pursue."
That led Mandell to explore art -- sculpture, drawing and painting -- and then create a consulting company. Slide show: See Mandell's art
2. Locking yourself in. For many boomers, retirement is the first time in their adult lives to be their own bosses -- that is, if they choose to. If they don't, that's
a big mistake, says Jeri Sedlar, author of 'Don't retire, rewire!' and an adviser to The Conference Board, a business research organization, on issues related to the aging work force. The most common problem
"It's unrealistic to try and come up with one giant plan for the rest of your life," she says. Instead, Sedlar advocates breaking up retirement plans into small, bite-size pieces.
"Don't let anyone tempt you into giving them a definitive answer to the question, 'What are you going to do with your retirement?'" she urges. "Figure it out, step by step, along the way."
3. Failing to communicate your dreams to loved ones. Spending decades of your working life with a spouse or significant other doesn't necessarily mean you've shared all your thoughts and dreams about retirement. Oh, and . . . tell your spouse
"One person wants to go and ski; the other wants to join the Peace Corps. That's a recipe for a problematic retirement," says Carlos Lowenberg, a financial adviser in Austin, Texas.
Another financial adviser, Brad Levin of Legacy Wealth Partners in Encino, Calif., has both spouses fill out a checklist of retirement goals -- separately. The two lists often look very different, he says. "Then the challenge is getting them to find middle ground that leaves both feeling they will have a retirement they can look forward to."
4. Leaping before you look. The retirement hall of shame is full of people whose dreams crashed into reality. "What gives you pleasure during a 10-day vacation isn't necessarily what you'll want from a retirement that lasts 30 years," points out Bob Gleeson, a vice president and the medical director of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance. A retirement test drive?
The same rules apply to a post-retirement career change. Whether you plan to start a business, move to a village in Italy or get involved in philanthropy, the best idea is to test-drive your plans before you begin. Get the skills you'll need; work in the field for a few months before making the leap. Or spend a few weeks in Sicily before you buy a villa.
5. Underestimating your longevity or health-care costs. You've built up a retirement nest egg, but that doesn't mean you should embark on a spending spree. You need to remember that one member of each couple reaching the age of 65 stands a 50-50 chance of living past age 90, and longevity is increasing all the time.
"It's a joke in this business that the ideal financial plan is one where your money lasts a day longer than you do," says financial adviser Levin. "But the nightmare
scenario is where someone has structured a financial plan that didn't include the possibility of living beyond 90 -- or of the major health-care costs that pile up late in retirement."
6. Counting on consulting. When it comes to pondering a post-retirement career, the field of consulting is a perennial favorite. But how many newly minted consultants does the market really need?
If you're expecting a consulting business to help pay the bills in retirement, test the waters before you dive in. The same is true of other businesses, says Chris Fahlund of T. Rowe Price.
"We've seen people buy franchises with the thought that this isn't really spending money, but investing, because they are putting it into a business to make money," she says.
The glitch, Fahlund notes, is that a lot of franchises don't work out, and the capital invested to acquire them is lost.
7. Overdoing it. Many boomers may want to avoid the lives of endless leisure lived by their parents in retirement. But it's possible to veer too far in the other direction as well, cautions Tom Rogerson, a financial adviser at BNY Mellon.
"How you go about striking that balance is the question that everyone needs to address," he says. To help his clients find a balance, Rogerson asks them what makes them "relax well enough to sleep at night," he says.
"It turns out that the days they slept well were days that they had been productive at something but had also spent time with friends and family," Rogerson says. So the key to reinventing retirement is hanging on to the best parts of working lives, he says, and replacing the rest with more time devoted to family, friends and other passions.
Published May 5, 2008
By Suzanne McGee, MSN Money
Baby boomers will live different retirement lives than their parents did. But the advantages of adventurous travel and second careers have pitfalls, too.
There's no single formula that will produce a happy retirement for baby boomers. But there are ways to boost the odds you'll retire in bliss rather than misery, experts say.
"About half of today's retirees are really quite miserable in their post-retirement lives," psychologist and researcher Ken Dychtwald has concluded, based on 50,000-plus interviews he has done for his books on aging.
Those retirees end up unhappy because they are unable to adapt to the new retirement model, says Jim McCarthy, a managing director at Morgan Stanley. How to be happy after work ends
"We have tended to look at our lives as being linear and retirement as being the final stage that we enter," McCarthy says. "If you realize that you're not locked in to any one approach or model -- that having 20 or 30 years gives you a lot of time to test out new roles for yourself -- well, you've boosted the odds that you'll succeed at retirement."
Having both time and options is a plus for boomers. But it also "pushes them to think outside their routines, beyond their comfort zone," says Sri Reddy, the head of retirement-income strategies for ING, a financial-services company. "Perhaps the biggest challenge boomers will face is a challenge to their imagination." Quiz: Are you ready for retirement?
As boomers start to act on their imaginations, experts say, there will be common traps to watch out for. Here are the top seven:
1. Exiting before deciding on an encore. Retiring early may seem like a status symbol, signaling financial success. But that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, says McCarthy, even if you really hate your job.
"You're not ready to retire until you've decided what you're going to do for an encore," McCarthy says.
A retirement-life plan doesn't have to be carved in stone, but it should exist, says Fred Mandell, a former Ameriprise executive.
Mandell, for example, began crafting his plan at age 55, three years before he retired in 2001.
"Once I began thinking about the future, I realized I didn't know what that would involve, and I drew up a kind of business plan around what I thought I might want to pursue."
That led Mandell to explore art -- sculpture, drawing and painting -- and then create a consulting company. Slide show: See Mandell's art
2. Locking yourself in. For many boomers, retirement is the first time in their adult lives to be their own bosses -- that is, if they choose to. If they don't, that's
a big mistake, says Jeri Sedlar, author of 'Don't retire, rewire!' and an adviser to The Conference Board, a business research organization, on issues related to the aging work force. The most common problem
"It's unrealistic to try and come up with one giant plan for the rest of your life," she says. Instead, Sedlar advocates breaking up retirement plans into small, bite-size pieces.
"Don't let anyone tempt you into giving them a definitive answer to the question, 'What are you going to do with your retirement?'" she urges. "Figure it out, step by step, along the way."
3. Failing to communicate your dreams to loved ones. Spending decades of your working life with a spouse or significant other doesn't necessarily mean you've shared all your thoughts and dreams about retirement. Oh, and . . . tell your spouse
"One person wants to go and ski; the other wants to join the Peace Corps. That's a recipe for a problematic retirement," says Carlos Lowenberg, a financial adviser in Austin, Texas.
Another financial adviser, Brad Levin of Legacy Wealth Partners in Encino, Calif., has both spouses fill out a checklist of retirement goals -- separately. The two lists often look very different, he says. "Then the challenge is getting them to find middle ground that leaves both feeling they will have a retirement they can look forward to."
4. Leaping before you look. The retirement hall of shame is full of people whose dreams crashed into reality. "What gives you pleasure during a 10-day vacation isn't necessarily what you'll want from a retirement that lasts 30 years," points out Bob Gleeson, a vice president and the medical director of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance. A retirement test drive?
The same rules apply to a post-retirement career change. Whether you plan to start a business, move to a village in Italy or get involved in philanthropy, the best idea is to test-drive your plans before you begin. Get the skills you'll need; work in the field for a few months before making the leap. Or spend a few weeks in Sicily before you buy a villa.
5. Underestimating your longevity or health-care costs. You've built up a retirement nest egg, but that doesn't mean you should embark on a spending spree. You need to remember that one member of each couple reaching the age of 65 stands a 50-50 chance of living past age 90, and longevity is increasing all the time.
"It's a joke in this business that the ideal financial plan is one where your money lasts a day longer than you do," says financial adviser Levin. "But the nightmare
scenario is where someone has structured a financial plan that didn't include the possibility of living beyond 90 -- or of the major health-care costs that pile up late in retirement."
6. Counting on consulting. When it comes to pondering a post-retirement career, the field of consulting is a perennial favorite. But how many newly minted consultants does the market really need?
If you're expecting a consulting business to help pay the bills in retirement, test the waters before you dive in. The same is true of other businesses, says Chris Fahlund of T. Rowe Price.
"We've seen people buy franchises with the thought that this isn't really spending money, but investing, because they are putting it into a business to make money," she says.
The glitch, Fahlund notes, is that a lot of franchises don't work out, and the capital invested to acquire them is lost.
7. Overdoing it. Many boomers may want to avoid the lives of endless leisure lived by their parents in retirement. But it's possible to veer too far in the other direction as well, cautions Tom Rogerson, a financial adviser at BNY Mellon.
"How you go about striking that balance is the question that everyone needs to address," he says. To help his clients find a balance, Rogerson asks them what makes them "relax well enough to sleep at night," he says.
"It turns out that the days they slept well were days that they had been productive at something but had also spent time with friends and family," Rogerson says. So the key to reinventing retirement is hanging on to the best parts of working lives, he says, and replacing the rest with more time devoted to family, friends and other passions.
Published May 5, 2008
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