Bob Carlson joins Suzanne to talk about senior retirement finances. Retirement has changed multiple times, and you can expect the details to change again before you retire, meaning you need to keep up or it can cost you a lot of money. Bob talks about changes to Medicare, inflation, and interest rates that affect retirement planning. Financial wellness is one of the 8 foundational principles of wellness, part of the Vitality Revolution podcast series sponsored by Humana.

A lot of people aren't getting the most out of their investment programs. Bob says, "People for the last couple of decades, really, they've done well just focusing on the investments, because the markets have done so well, and good returns in the investment markets have really covered up a lot of mistakes and oversights in the other areas of retirement, because the strong returns have enabled you to overcome mistakes that cost you money in other areas. But I think that's kind of drawing to a close. We're still not back to the 2022 peak in the stock markets before that bear market. And I think I think lower investment returns are in the future. So anyone who's in or near retirement really needs to be focusing on these non-investment parts of retirement, rather than just thinking investment returns are gonna bail them out of everything."

“I see actually six kind of issues coming up on people that I think are going to come to what I call the retirement squeeze. We can discuss those in some detail, but it's things like lower returns, investment markets – inflation is back. Social security and Medicare have financial problems. Your taxes are probably gonna go up, not down in the future. So there's this whole range of issues that are gonna change the whole retirement finance picture for a lot of people going forward, and as I said, you need to get away from just focusing on investments and look at this whole big picture of what your retirement finances are like.

"A key thing people overlook, when you do surveys of people who have been retired for a while, they say the big mistake they made was they didn't realize how long their life expectancy was. They didn't focus on longevity and they say there were a lot of decisions they would have made differently if they'd realized what their real life expectancy was.

"How do you anticipate proper longevity? How do you plan for that? Because a lot of people, when they were young, they were told their generation is going to live to the mid- to late seventies. But as you get older, as you avoid these early-in-life deaths that occur to a substantial part of your generation, your life expectancy goes up much higher. Suddenly someone who's 65 today is going to have a life expectancy on average of about another 20 years. which most did not anticipate. and most still are thinking their life expectancy is somewhere in the mid to late seventies when it's really significantly longer than that. And, and 25% of the population in that age group now is going to live to 85 or beyond. And many people don't realize that and they don't make decisions accordingly."

Learn more:

* Bob Carlson: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K8LP5K/about
* Retirement Watch newsletter: https://www.retirementwatch.com/ or 800-552-1152
* Retirement Watch: The Essential Guide to Retiring in the 2020s at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Retirement-Watch-Essential-Guide-Retiring/dp/1684513332
* The Vitality Revolution podcast series: https://answersforelders.com/vitality-revolution/
* Humana: https://www.humana.com/
* Answers for Elders: https://answersforelders.com/welcome-to-answers-for-elders/

Hear more podcasts about financial wellness at https://answersforelders.com/financial-wellness

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