Tag Archives: retirement

The Week That Spanned a Year: 12/29/13 – 1/4/14

Current Events – Everything you need to know about Obamacare in one place – Probably the best, most easily understood piece about Obamacare and what it means for you…with video!

Oh Shit! Issue of the Week Retirement crisis being brought on by aging boomers who didn’t save squat and fewer young workers to fund the retirement system.

Cutest Video of the Week – A dad, his daughter and a pink plastic ukulele.

Stupid Person of the Week – The man who didn’t bring home the beer.

Technology – Year of the Glasshole – Excerpt – “An anecdote: I wanted to wear Google Glass during the birth of our second child. My wife was extremely unreceptive to this idea when I suggested it. Angry, even. But as we got a bit closer to the date, she began to warm to it and eventually landed somewhere in the neighborhood of bemused hostility.”

History – Nattering Nabobs of Negativism Through the Ages From the printing press to the internet and how pundits of their times thought they’d ruin society.

Marketing – How to make things go viral A must read for anyone in the business of getting attention, whether for themselves or their business.

Small Business – 10 Bold Predictions for 2014 – #9, that Obamacare will be very popular with super-small businesses, is spot on.

Oy of the Week – Meet the people who think the US is 2014 years old

Quote of the Week – “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” – Albert Einstein

Winston-Salem Makes a Great Geezerville

Winston-Salem made the Forbes list of 25 Best Places to Retire in 2013. Here's what they wrote:

Pros: Low cost of living, median home price $129,000, moderate climate, college amenities (Wake Forest), high doctors per capita, high Milken Institute aging rank. Con: Crime.

Other North Carolina cities that made the list were Charlotte and Asheville.

The Silver Lining in My “I’ll Never Be Able to Retire” Cloud

As someone who's never made a ton of money, has been self-employed for much of my career, has not been real good about setting aside funds for retirement and is of the generation that will suffer first when the Boomers bankrupt the Social Security and Medicare systems, I long ago reconciled myself to the idea that I'll probably never be able to retire. That sounds like a bummer, but since I don't play golf I don't think it's that big of a deal. And there's this positive aspect of not retiring – I'll probably live longer:

We find that a reduction in the retirement age causes a significant increase in the risk of premature death – defined as death before age 67 – for males but not for females. The effect for males is not only statistically significant but also quantitatively important. According to our estimates, one additional year of early retirement causes an increase in the risk of premature death of 2.4 percentage points (a relative increase of about 13.4%; or 1.8 months in terms of years of life lost)…

The authors trace the effect to negative behavioral changes associated with early retirement and conclude that “32.4% of the causal retirement effect can be directly attributed to smoking and excessive alcohol consumption.”