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NAIPC® News
August 11, 2014
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First Aging in Place National Planning Day |
The National Aging in Place Council has designated Wednesday, October 15 as National Aging in Place Planning Day across America. We hope all of our members will participate.
On that day, aging Americans in cities where NAIPC has local chapters will be invited to sit with our members and make a plan for Aging in Place. The guide for the plan will be a new template developed by NAIPC called Act II: Your Plan for Aging in Place. The template grew out of our 2013 Annual Meeting and our Aging in Place Summit held in Washington, DC last October at which 25 industry thought leaders in various areas devoted to aging convened to discuss clarifying the value of Aging in Place.
Until now, Aging in Place has been a good but rather vague idea. The attendees at our conferences defined it as a lifestyle choice that includes housing, personal finance, health and wellness, transportation, and community interaction. Each of these areas affects the others, and the most successful aging is facilitated by a plan that examines each of these areas—what do you have and what do you need.
Act III: Your Plan for Aging in Place guides aging Americans through each of these topics and helps them assess their own situations. Once seniors determine their needs, they are invited to submit their plan to a local NAIPC chapter or to our national office which will respond with ideas about fulfilling those needs. Prior to National Aging in Place Planning Day, we will hold webinars to train members on how to work with the template and assess results.
Hard copies of Act III are now available by contacting our office. We intend to post it as an interactive tool on the ageinplace.org site. |
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Greater Pittsburgh Chapter Featured in Local Publication |
"It takes a village...Many services and support mechanisms are necessary to ensure a healthy, safe, and successful outcome."
This is one of four key issues that Greater Pittsburgh Chapter Chair, Patricia Neurohr, realized as she navigated the process of helping her parents Age in Place. Other realizations Patricia came to were that not enough seniors planned ahead, that, at some point in the aging process, everyone needs help of some sort, and that family support systems are crucial.
The article, published in the latest issue of Pittsburgh Fifty-Five Plus magazine, explains how Patricia's revelations about the aging process and Aging in Place led her to form her local NAIPC Chapter.
Click here to read the full article on page 18. |
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Unplanned Child Support |
Traditionally, when people make a plan for their retirement, they expect to support their children as best they can through their educational years and then, hopefully, the kids are on their own. But in the protracted wake of the recession, and partially due to behavior choices of the younger adult generations, support of children has become a frequent additional burden upon retirement planning.
At the recent Center for Retirement Research conference in Washington, Rick Miller, the keynote speaker and a Certified Financial Planner with Sensible Financial Planning in Boston, reported that his firm has about 200 clients who are mostly not rich but have planned well for their retirement—and yet many of them have retirement funding issues. Often, the problem is their children.
Miller ran off a list of post-college issues that today’s young or even middle-aged adults face who are in need of support: big weddings, bad marriages and their results, costly housing in the cities they tend to drift towards, health issues, disappointing jobs or no jobs at all, entrepreneurship that goes awry, substance abuse.
The issue for retirees is, how do you plan for any of this? How do you plan for your child who is used to sharing two salaries having to live on one?
Who anticipates that their child is going to have alcohol or drug issues? And this is in addition to the other great unknowns-- health issues and longevity.
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Insuring Longevity |
The Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for retirement and health policy, J. Mark Iwry, has been tackling the issue of funding longevity.
As reported by Tara Siegel Bernard in the New York Times in July, “New tax rules will make it possible for workers to buy a type of annuity often called longevity insurance inside their retirement plans. The annuity aims to protect people from exhausting their savings in their later years.
“Longevity insurance is actually a deferred-income annuity, in which a person pays a lump sum premium to an insurer in exchange for a guaranteed lifetime income stream that begins several years later — perhaps well into the person’s 70s or 80s. Until now, these annuities could not be widely used in 401(k) retirement plans and individual retirement accounts because those plans require account holders to begin withdrawals — known as required minimum distributions — at age 70 ½.”
But the Treasury Department recently announced that, Bernard writes, “Workers can now satisfy those rules if they use a portion of their retirement money to buy the annuities and begin collecting the income by age 85. The move is part of the Obama administration’s broader effort to develop ways to provide Americans with more security in retirement.”
“As boomers approach retirement and life expectancies increase, longevity income annuities can be an important option to help Americans plan for retirement and ensure they have a regular stream of income for as long as they can live,” Iwry, told Bernard. The new rules take effect immediately.
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Considering a Less Conventional Housing Arrangement |
More and more seniors, finding themselves divorced or still single in their retirement years, are moving towards less conventional housing arrangements. Shared housing is on the rise for those in their retirement ages.
According to a recent New York Times article, "among nonfamily households, the percentage of women 65 and older who choose not to live alone has grown to 3.8 percent, up from 2.96 percent in 2005." Consider sharing your home, or joining a co-housing community near you!
To read the full article, click here.
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