The prospect of living a longer life brings with it the exciting possibility of more time to enjoy experiences, pursue passions, and spend with loved ones. However, it also presents the daunting challenge of financing an extended lifespan. As life expectancy continues to rise, reassessing your financial plans, especially for retirement, is essential to ensure that your savings can endure longer than anticipated. Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you financially prepare for a long and fulfilling life.
Reconsidering Retirement Age
The Social Security Act of 1935 established 65 as the retirement age when the average life expectancy was significantly lower – 60 for men and 64 for women. With life expectancy now extending into the 80s and beyond, retiring at 65 means living on your savings for potentially 20 to 30 years, which may not be sustainable without substantial savings. Today, over half of babies born are expected to reach 100, highlighting the need for change to accommodate longer lives. Instead of rushing into retirement, consider extending your working years if you have the physical and mental capacity to do so. Continuing to work, even part-time or in consulting roles, allows you to keep earning and saving, thereby reducing the financial strain of a prolonged retirement. Additionally, this gradual transition can provide a sense of purpose and keep you engaged.
Adjusting for Inflation
Inflation is a critical factor in financial planning, as the value of money erodes over time. This means you will need more income in the future to maintain your current lifestyle. To account for inflation, conservatively adjust your income needs, considering an average inflation rate of around 3%. For instance, if you currently live on $125,000 a year, you would need approximately $194,746 to maintain your lifestyle in 15 years, and about $300,000 in 30 years.
Developing Goal-Oriented Savings Habits
Increasing your savings rate is crucial in preparing for rising future costs. Traditional advice suggests saving 10% of your income but aiming for 15% to 20% is more advisable, depending on your economic means. Start by creating a budget to track your spending and identify areas where you can cut back. Redirect these funds toward savings or investments to build a robust financial cushion. Utilize technology to help manage and monitor your finances. Building cash reserves for emergencies and investment opportunities is also essential.
Diversifying Investment Strategies
A diversified investment portfolio is vital for long-term financial planning. As you approach and enter retirement, your investment strategy should balance preserving your wealth and generating income. Diversify your investments across various asset classes. This approach helps mitigate risk and offers the potential for growth and income over time. Consider consulting with us to develop a personalized investment strategy that aligns with your risk tolerance and retirement goals. We can help you navigate market volatility and make informed decisions to protect and grow your savings.
Planning for Healthcare Costs
Longer lifespans mean increased healthcare costs, which can significantly impact your financial planning. As you age, healthcare expenses tend to rise, making it essential to factor these costs into your retirement plan. Consider purchasing long-term care insurance or setting up a Health Savings Account (HSA) to cover potential medical expenses. These steps can help mitigate financial strain and ensure you have the necessary funds to address healthcare needs.
Estate Planning and Legacy Considerations
As life expectancy increases, so does the importance of estate planning. Proper estate planning ensures that your assets are distributed according to your wishes and minimizes the tax burden on your heirs. Work with an estate planning attorney to develop a comprehensive plan, which includes drafting a will, setting up trusts, and designating beneficiaries for your assets. Regularly review and update your estate plan to reflect changes in your life circumstances and ensure it remains aligned with your goals.
Embracing a Flexible Retirement Approach
Adopting a flexible retirement approach allows you to adapt to changing circumstances and needs throughout your extended lifespan. This could involve working part-time, taking on consulting roles, or pursuing entrepreneurial ventures to generate additional income and maintain financial security. Staying engaged in the workforce can also contribute to your overall well-being and life satisfaction.
Partnering with a Financial Adviser
Navigating the complexities of financial planning for an extended lifespan can be challenging. Partnering with us can help you uncover blind spots, develop personalized strategies, and create a comprehensive financial plan designed to support your longer life. We can assist in assessing your life expectancy, estimating future expenses, and planning for inflation impacts on your spending power. We can also guide you in balancing guaranteed income sources like Social Security and annuities with higher-risk investments to mitigate longevity risk and ensure financial stability.
Securing Longevity
Preparing for a longer life requires a proactive and comprehensive approach to financial planning. By reconsidering your retirement age, addressing inflation, developing goal-oriented savings habits, diversifying investments, planning for healthcare costs, and seeking our guidance, you can pave the way for a secure, fulfilling, and financially stable future. Embrace the opportunities that come with extended lifespans, and take the necessary steps to ensure your financial well-being during your golden years.
If you have any questions, give us a call, or read “Wealth on Purpose” by Bryan Ballentine.
Have a great weekend!
Sources: Located at the bottom of the article.
Golf Tip of the Week
8 Things I Learned From Pros at The 2024 U.S. Open
Bryson DeChambeau is at his best when he has a problem to solve. The solutions, usually, end up looking pretty strange. But the solutions always end up working.
It’s probably the thing I most admire about Bryson, and the thing the rest of us can learn the most from.
Bryson started his professional career as a shorter hitter, a sketchy putter, and an unimpressive wedge player. He was a serial underperformer as a result: In his first 21 events as a professional, he missed 11 cuts. After a T-2 finish at the 2016 Puerto Rico Open—his only top 10 finish since a year earlier—DeChambeau finished T-44 in his next start, then promptly missed eight more consecutive cuts. In his first 11 major starts as a professional, he notched exactly zero top 20s.
In some alternate universe where golf exists, Bryson DeChambeau is a middling tour player who eventually loses his card and ends up on a driving range somewhere.
Instead, DeChambeau pushed his way towards a different destiny because somewhere along the way, he stopped caring about what other people think about his own game. He’s one of those players who doesn’t care how something looks, or what others think about how it looks. If it helps him, he does it. If it doesn’t, he doesn’t. There’s no sense of shame or embarrassment. To him, the only stupid thing is not doing something you think would help because you’re worried about looking weird.
It’s also a quality I find most endearing about the game itself. Golf is a humbling game which forces you to confront your own ego in a quest for improvement. Keep yourself honest.: How much pride are you willing to swallow to get a little better?
1. Understand acceleration profiles
The garage in Bryson’s house is littered with prototype putters of every variation you can imagine. Long putters; short putters; side-saddle putters; light putters; heavy putters; one partially 3D-printed putter he likes the look of but didn’t put in play because he couldn’t scoop the ball easily with it.
One of those it-looks-weird-but-I-don’t-care areas for Bryson is his putting stroke. Bryson used to be a pretty bad putter, even when he was a very good amateur golfer. But through radical trial and error, he landed upon a system. It works for him, and there’s some stuff we can learn, too.
There are lots of parts of Bryson’s putting system, but one of the most interesting and underrated is his extremely detailed approach to speed control, which is probably the most important part of putting.
Before every round Bryson places a ruler by his ball, and a tee 30 feet away. His standard is something like 10 inches: Meaning that when he takes a 10 inch backstroke, with a through stroke that isn’t either accelerating or decelerating severely (he calls that his “acceleration profile,” which he checks using a Foresight QuadMAX), he knows the ball will roll out 30 feet.
But if that day, he makes a backstroke that’s 10 inches and watches the ball rollout 33 feet he knows the greens are 10 percent faster that day than his standard, so he adjusts his read and speed on every putt accordingly. If it rolls out 36 feet, he knows they’re 20 percent faster.
Our brains work best when we give it parameters, and give stable reference points to make judgments off. That’s what Bryson does every day. The rest of us obviously aren’t going to go to the same degree, but we can adopt the same idea: Starting every round hitting the same length putt, monitoring how far we’re taking the putter back and how fast it’s moving through, and paying attention to the result.
2. Beware the small muscles
Have you ever noticed that the grip on Bryson’s putter is upside down? That’s because Bryson’s rotates his left arm as far left as it will go, then grips the putter. It means the palm of his left hand is facing almost directly out in front, a near 180 degree difference than the way most golfers grip their putter with their left hand—that’s why his grip is on backwards.
Bryson’s backwards grip quite literally locks his left arm so far left, that he can’t move it any more left.
“There’s so much range of motion in all these little muscles in the hands and wrists and arms,” he told me once. “I don’t want any of that.”
His grip makes pulling putts, he says, basically impossible. I don’t know exactly if it’s true, but it’s interesting that the man who Bryson beat on Sunday pulled his crucial two-footer left of the hole. The small muscles appeared to take over at exactly the wrong moment.
3. One miss is fine, two is killer
Speaking of pulls I must admit: Watching Rory McIlroy on the range on Saturday evening before his final round, it didn’t seem like I was watching a man who is about to win a major championship.
Rory was frustrated at a variety of misses late in his third round, which continued into his final round.
“The miss on 16 [left] was a reaction to the miss on 15 [right]. The miss on 17 [right] was a reaction to the miss on 16 [left],” he said on the range.
Rory’s most common miss was high and right, which was annoying but, ultimately, fine. The wheels came off ultimately when he started reacting to that right miss with a panicky left miss. That’s what he was so frustrated about on the range on Saturday.
Rory knows this, but the oldest cliche in golf is a true one. Golf is a game of misses. One annoying, even persistent, miss isn’t the enemy. Rory built a two-shot lead on the back-nine with that lingering right miss. It’s when you start over-correcting for that miss in a way that sends the ball in every direction, that the downward slide begins.
4. Perfection doesn’t exist—for anyone
Along those lines, I love this quote from Ludvig Aberg. When the rest of us see Aberg, we see a tall, handsome man with a perfect golf swing. Aberg is wiser enough to know that’s not true. Perfection? That’s a myth. It’s a game of misses when you’re on the course, and a game of tendency-management whenever you’re not.
“As a golfer, you’re always going to have tendencies. You’re always going to have something in your swing that you’re going to work on,” he said. “That’s the case for me, as well. We worked on those tendencies. Sometimes it just shows up. You can’t be perfect all the time.”
5. Tee it high…even with irons?
My week at Pinehurst started on Monday, when I bumped into Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee. Chamblee in the booth for NBC this week, so he was out early U.S. Open week scouting Monday’s star-studded practice round of Tiger Woods, Justin Thomas, Rickie Fowler, and Jordan Spieth, when he pointed out something interesting.
“Look how high Tiger tees the ball with his irons,” he said.
It was right. JT’s ball was nearly flush to the ground on the par-3 17th. Tiger’s was probably a quarter of an inch off the turf.
“It gives him a few extra degrees of launch,” Chamblee said, “and a few feet higher ball flight, so he can hold greens these firm a little better.”
Tiger’s ball did just that. It sailed into the air, and came down soft onto the back portion of the surface.
It’s the details that matter in the U.S. Open, when the margins between good and bad are at their thinnest. Tiger doesn’t have the physical tools to match anymore, but his mind remains as sharp as ever.
6. An A+ piece of advice
I was extremely delighted and slightly jealous that my colleague Chris Powers had the best game improvement tweet of U.S. Open week. I truly can’t say it any better myself…
7. Give yourself the right kind of feedback
What would you do if you were about to play a U.S. Open you were extremely unprepared for? I would probably start playing a lot of golf.
Robert Rock, the 37-year-old who came out of retirement to unexpectedly qualify for the U.S. Open, did exactly the opposite. And it was actually kind of genius.
Rock spent his weeks leading up to Pinehurst hitting balls into a net. He played just a handful of holes over those weeks, and then went back to his net afterwards. He used a video camera to film his swing, but the net was his way of divorcing himself from his own expectations. It’s hard to stress about where the ball is going when you literally don’t know where the ball is going.
Instead, Rock’s goal was simply to improve his technique, knowing that was his path to best golf. To focus on the process—the one thing we can control, as golfers—and less on the result, which we can’t.
8. The kings of the golf swing
Every other week of the year, The Cradle is an incredible par-3 course which players travel across the country to enjoy. During U.S. Open week, it’s a driving range for pros. A super nice driving range, but on Thursday afternoon Max Grayserman intentionally found the very worst part of it. Squirreled away in the far right corner, he spent about an hour hitting golf balls on an uneven patch of sand.
Coincidentally, on the other side of the range, Canadian Nick Taylor was holding his club out in front of him like a samurai sword before each shot.
The two things players and teachers care most about is where the clubhead is hitting the ground, and where the clubface is pointing when it hits the ball. That’s what Taylor and Grayserman were doing:
- Taylor was holding his club that way to create a sense of awareness between the back of his left hand and the club face.
- Grayserman was hitting balls from the unforgiving sand to force himself to make crispy contact with the ball first.
Club before ground, face square at impact. Important stuff happens in between, of course, but those two are the kings of the golf swing. It’s funny how during the biggest weeks, you see players start to pay homage to that.
Tip adapted from golfdigest.comi
Recipe of the Week
Breakfast Crunchwrap Supreme
Ingredients
Creamy Jalapeno Sauce
- 1/3 c. sour cream
- Juice of 1/2 lime
- 1 jalapeño, minced
- 1/4 tsp. paprika
- kosher salt
- Freshly ground black pepper
Crunchwraps
- 4 frozen hash brown patties
- 5 large eggs
- 1 Tbsp. whole milk
- 1 Tbsp. butter
- kosher salt
- Freshly ground black pepper
- 2 Tbsp. finely chopped chives
- 4 large flour tortillas
- 6 slices cooked bacon, chopped
- 1 c. shredded Cheddar
- 1 c. Shredded Monterey Jack
- Vegetable oil, for pan
Instructions
Creamy Jalapeno Sauce
- In a small bowl, whisk together sour cream, lime juice, jalapeño and paprika. Season with salt and pepper. Set aside.
Crunchwraps
- Bake frozen hash brown patties according to package instructions.
- In a large bowl, combine eggs and milk and whisk until frothy. In a medium nonstick pan, melt butter over medium heat. Pour egg mixture into the pan. Let set slightly then reduce heat to medium-low. Drag the eggs with a spatula or wooden spoon to create curds. When the eggs are almost cooked to your liking, season with salt and pepper. Fold in chives and remove from heat.
- Spread the jalapeño sauce onto the center of each flour tortilla, then top each with a hash brown patty, scrambled eggs, bacon, cheddar and Monterey Jack. Fold tortillas around the center, creating pleats. After wrapping, quickly invert crunchwraps so the pleats are on the bottom and they stay together.
- In a medium nonstick pan over medium heat, heat a very thin layer of vegetable oil. Working one at a time, add crunchwrap seam-side down and cook until tortilla is golden on the bottom, 3 to 5 minutes. Flip crunchwrap and cook until the other side is golden, 3 to 5 minutes more.
- Repeat with remaining crunchwraps. Cut each in half and serve warm.
Recipe adapted from Delish.comii
Travel Tip of the Week
Does Wrapping Your Luggage Make It More Secure? TSA Weighs In
It’s a common sight at any airport around the world — wrapping stations offering “additional protection” at a cost. The price can vary anywhere from $15 to $30 or more, with the more expensive options typically offering some sort of travel insurance. Most people wrap their luggage because they feel it’s safer, but is this true? I spoke with Saraiah Davis, transportation security manager, and Lorie Dankers, a spokesperson for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), to find out.
How TSA Handles Wrapped Luggage
Your suitcase has quite the journey from the baggage counter to your aircraft. When you check your bag at a U.S. airport, it goes through an explosive detection system. This is a 3D scanner that can identify anything that could be a potential explosive. “If the technology flags the bag, the 3D X-ray image is sent to a TSA officer to review,” explains Dankers. “TSA officers look at hundreds of X-ray images, so they know what common items look like on the X-ray screen.” The technology doesn’t single out any bags that have been wrapped, so that won’t prevent a bag from being opened if it does get flagged.
After reviewing the image, the officer can either clear it and send the bag to the airline or flag it for a physical inspection. Only 5 percent of bags are opened for physical inspection, so it’s a much smaller number than you might think. In the physical inspection, the officers will open up the suitcase by any means necessary. If your bag is wrapped, the wrapping will need to be cut to do the examination. Davis explained that all baggage inspection rooms have CCTV cameras with heavy accountability, so there’s never a concern about theft.
When wrapped baggage is cut for inspection, it doesn’t get rewrapped. The wrapping will either get thrown away or taped together, but it won’t be the same as it originally was. Davis says that most bag wrapping typically occurs on international flights, as travelers want that added layer of protection. Sometimes, bags are in bad condition and are wrapped to keep them together. If one of these bags needs to be opened and cannot safely reach the final destination, the TSA will contact the airline to notify the passenger about the status of their bag and where to retrieve it.
Bottom Line
It’s generally not recommended to wrap your bag, as it doesn’t provide any substantial benefits that can justify the added cost. If you want extra protection for your luggage while it’s in transit, you should purchase a suitcase with a TSA-approved lock. This way, if your suitcase needs to be opened for whatever reason, they can do so easily. The only real benefit wrapping your bag could offer is protection against regular wear and tear, and this is only a real concern if you want to keep your suitcase looking brand-new. Otherwise, stick with a TSA-approved lock and enjoy your summer travels.
Tip adapted from travelandleisure.comiii
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Sources:
5 Ways to Prepare for a Longer Life
If you’re expecting a long life, take time to adjust your financial plan
Financial Planning in an Age of Increasing Longevity
How To Plan For A Longer Retirement
Disclosure:
Ballentine Capital Advisors is a registered investment adviser. The advisory services of Ballentine Capital Advisors are not made available in any jurisdiction in which Ballentine Capital Advisors is not registered or is otherwise exempt from registration.
Please review Ballentine Capital Advisors Disclosure Brochure for a complete explanation of fees. Investing involves risks. Investments are not guaranteed and may lose value.
This material is prepared by Ballentine Capital Advisors for informational purposes only. It is not intended to serve as a substitute for personalized investment advice or as a recommendation or solicitation or any particular security, strategy, or investment product.
No representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve future profits or losses similar to those shown. You should not assume that investment decisions we make in the future will be profitable or equal the investment performance of the past. Past performance does not indicate future results.
Advisory services through Ballentine Capital Advisors, Inc.
i https://www.golfdigest.com/story/2024-us-open-pinehurst-things-i-learned-from-pros-golf-digest
ii https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/recipes/a52456/breakfast-crunchwrap-supreme-recipe/
iii https://www.travelandleisure.com/plastic-wrapping-luggage-what-to-know-8659011
