With our current economic challenges, those of us looking forward to retirement need to be well-informed about our financial needs in coming years. And not only pre-retirees, but individuals already in retirement need to be wise to the changing economic environment. The good news is there are trained professionals who keep abreast of changes in the current economy, changes in laws and changes in government programs for the elderly. Professionals in this field are equipped to handle everything from help with retirement savings accounts, investment advice, guidance on government programs, estate planning or even new funding options such as reverse mortgages. A little planning prior to retirement will allow you to maintain your current lifestyle; whereas, a lack of planning may require you to live on an extremely tight budget. For those already retired, taking time right now to deal with financial problems instead of waiting for a crisis to happen is well advised.

A large number of retired individuals feel that they have planned well for the future only to find that rising medical costs, damage done to investment portfolios (by the current economy) and many other factors have caused them to go into debt. According to an article in “USA Today” seniors are racking up debt like never before. Elderly individuals who are in debt live with a constant burden over their heads. Most of these people are on fixed incomes and have no way of paying off credit cards and home equity loans that continue to mount to cover household budget deficits. In order to meet ongoing payments, seniors often forego purchasing medications and skimp on food budgets. They live like hermits — never going out and pinching every penny — in order to pay their obligations.

Most of these people worked hard their entire lives and managed their debt. They never anticipated the rising costs of prescriptions, expensive medical care or depletion of savings by living too long. The good news is there is help for these individuals. Here are just a few examples of some relief options that could be available. There are many more besides these.

Reverse mortgages – A Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs), also known as a reverse mortgage, is a risk-free way of tapping into home equity without creating monthly payments and without requiring the money to be paid back during a person’s lifetime. Instead of making payments the cash flow is reversed and the senior receives payments from the bank. Thus the title “reverse mortgage”. For those seniors who are less fortunate financially but own a home, a reverse mortgage can allow them to remain in the home by creating extra income.

Life settlements — A life settlement enables older individuals, businesses and other organizations to sell life insurance policies they currently own – but no longer want or need – for an amount greater than the cash surrender value. In some cases the value can be 2-3 times the cash surrender value. Even some term life insurance policies with a conversion option to permanent coverage can qualify for a life settlement.

Government Programs — Some government programs such as food stamps provide temporary financial help for food. Other programs provide subsidized housing, help with medical expenses and provide tax credits. For veterans there is free health care, inexpensive prescriptions and disability income. Area agencies on aging offer individual counseling, legal help and advice with Medicare costs. (National Care Planning Council)

For some, living on a fixed income and dealing with debt can be an overwhelming burden. There are knowledgeable professionals and debt relief strategies that can assist in easing this burden. The National Care Planning Council keeps a list of financial advisers and attorneys who specialize in this area of planning at www.longtermcarelink.net.

Martin V. Higgins,CFP,CLU,AEP AEP is a financial practitioner who specializes in helping people prepare financially for long term care.

Family Wealth Management is a professional firm providing customized financial planning and wealth management solutions to our clientele of pre-retirees, retirees, widows and small business owners.

We invite you to visit our website @ http://www.familywealthadvisory.com to learn how Family Wealth Management may be the right choice for you, your family or business.

Two studies confirm previous evidence that it reduces mortality

By Ed Edelson
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, March 22 (HealthDay News) — Two major studies confirm the current medical consensus that moderate drinking appears to be good for the heart but heavy drinking is bad for health in general.

“This would not change our current guidelines, which provide an upper limit and not a lower limit, no more than two drinks a day for men and no more than one drink a day for women,” said Dr. Kenneth J. Mukamal, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is lead author of one of the reports published online March 23 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The new study, using data from nine National Health Interview Surveys done between 1987 and 2000, is more thorough than previous reports and provides “some of the strongest evidence to date” of a link between moderate drinking and a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, Mukamal said.

Specifically, the study tries to separate out the health effects of people who list themselves as abstainers, some of whom have never touched the stuff and others who were heavy drinkers but gave it up because of possible damage to their health.

“Some studies have done better than others at that, but this is by far the largest effort to do it,” Mukamal said. “We have data on more than 2 million person-years, appropriately weighted so that it is representative of Americans over the last 20 years.”

The study looked specifically at deaths from cardiovascular conditions such as heart attack and stroke. It found a lower rate of such deaths in light and moderate drinkers than among people who never drank or quit. The type of alcoholic beverage — beer, wine, liquor — made no difference.

“Indeed, the lowest rate of cardiovascular mortality was among those who drink moderately,” Mukamal said. “That benefit is clearly eliminated in people who drank above that level.”

The results “dovetail nicely” with those of previous reports, but “they are not likely to lead to any recommendation to drink alcohol,” Mukamal said, since drinking can have adverse effects on organs outside the cardiovascular system.

A second report in the same issue of the journal by Italian doctors and epidemiologists at Catholic University, in Campobasso, looked at the relationship between alcohol consumption and death rates in eight studies that included more than 29,000 drinkers and nondrinkers who had cardiovascular disease.

Moderate alcohol intake had a protective effect for those people, the report said. It found the maximum reduction in risk of death from all causes among those whose alcohol intake ranged from 5 to 10 grams a day. (A typical drink is usually defined as containing 13.7 grams of alcohol.)

For cardiovascular deaths alone, the maximum protective effect — a 22 percent reduction — was found for a daily intake of 25 grams of alcohol. The death rate went up with higher daily alcohol intake levels.

Their bottom line: “In patients with cardiovascular disease, light to moderate alcohol consumption (5 to 25 grams per day), was significantly associated with a lower incidence of cardiovascular and all-cause mortality.”

But it’s important to remember that advice about drinking should be made on the basis of a person’s specific risk factors, said Dr. Arthur L. Klatsky, a senior consultant in cardiology at the Kaiser Permanente Health Plan in California, who wrote an accompanying editorial.

For example, there is no net benefit of moderate drinking for young women, since it increases the risk of breast cancer, Klatsky said, but the cardiovascular benefits for middle-aged men and women are there.

“Advice about this has to be given on an individual basis,” he said.

More information

Frequently asked questions about alcohol and health are answered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

SOURCES: Kenneth J. Mukamal, M.D., associate professor, medicine, Harvard Medical School, and internist, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston; Arthur L. Klatsky, M.D., senior consultant, cardiology, Kaiser Permanente Health Plan, Oakland, Calif.; March 23, 2010, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, online

By May 1, as the whole world donned surgical masks, a relatively new strain of swine flu virus, H1N1, had become the focus of the 24/7 global media machine. The official alert level had been raised by the World Health Organization to a Phase 5 outbreak, just one bracket shy of the peak, which signifies the most deadly sort of global pandemic. Condign warnings of mass death and economic disaster dominated the airwaves and the Internet. That next week, swine flu was, to all intents and purposes, the only story.

Yet on May 6, Mexico City—in which this new black plague had staged its breakout—lifted a weeklong ban on restaurants seating customers. The next day, the national government allowed universities, high schools, churches and museums to re-open; grammar schools opened five days later. Face masks disappeared. And around the world over the following week, this new disease—which has quickly proved little more contagious than ordinary influenza, and quite effectively treatable with antiviral drugs—faded away, but for wildly overpublicized reports of the occasional—and isolated—death.

Through May 18, the World Health Organization reported a grand total of 8,829 confirmed cases in 40 countries, resulting in 74 deaths, six of them in the United States. For perspective, in the United States alone, each and every year the garden-variety seasonal flu infects between 15 and 60 million people, hospitalizing 200,000 and killing 36,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

What had happened, as reported by The Economist among other rational observers of the story, was that the first known case was a little boy in the Mexican state of Veracruz, who was diagnosed on April 2. The first confirmed death—of a 39-year-old woman in Oaxaca—occurred on April 13. But the Mexican health authorities hadn’t the technology to perform genomic analysis, the process by which new viruses may be quite quickly identified, and they did not send samples abroad until April 22. By the time the strain was isolated—as the not terribly aggressive and eminently treatable bug that it is—the whole world was in full-on panic mode.

In effect, the pandemic was over before it began. This did not forestall any number of global outbreaks of idiocy, among them the slaughter of 400,000 pigs in Egypt (never mind that the disease is mainly transmitted human to human), and a characteristically odd statement from the Vice President of the United States, who averred that he wouldn’t let his family take Amtrak.

Yet every single news story, during the brief shelf life of this incipient pandemic, referred in gruesome detail to the Spanish Flu of 1918–19, which killed 675,000 Americans and some 22 million people worldwide. Never mind that this was long before antibiotics, let alone genomic analysis, and that the recommended precautions included mustard baths, gargling salt water, and Bovril. This pandemic is always ritually cited by the media as they do their best to whip up a firestorm of alarmism over the latest health-related tempest in a teapot.

The great swine flu outbreak of 2009 thus joins a long, ignominious line of equally overhyped nonevents.

A 1976 swine flu outbreak at Fort Dix, NJ set off a similar hysteria, during which America’s top health official estimated it would kill one million Americans. One person died.

In the 1990s, a “mad cow” panic enveloped the earth. In a 1997 book, the normally rational Richard Rhodes warned that the human variant of mad cow (called vCJD) might kill half a million people per year in Britain alone. To date, confirmed cases worldwide, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, total about 150.

In the post-September 11 panic of 2001, an isolated instance of someone mailing small doses of anthrax to a handful of political and media personalities was spun into a nationwide terrorist germ-warfare threat. Six people died, including a 93-year-old Connecticut woman.

Then there was the SARS panic of 2002-2003 (worldwide deaths to date per the WHO: 774), followed in 2005 by the massive global avian flu panic (257 deaths at last report).

With each and every outbreak, the media have erupted in full hysterical frenzy, fearmongering in inverse proportion to the actual threat.

It is always extremely difficult for investors and their advisors alike to gauge the full effect of the media’s bias for catastrophism during relatively real events like the global financial meltdown of 2008. In exactly this regard, it will be importantly useful to remember the extent to which they blow out of all proportion—when they don’t totally invent—some or another putative health crisis.

The single greatest deterrent to rational investor behavior is the 24-hour cable news cycle, now trumpeting to the skies some “new era” technology (e.g. the Internet in 1999), then decrying the end of economic life on the planet as we have known it (e.g. the global economy falling off a cliff in 2008). Journalism’s constant refrain that recent economic events were comparable to the Great Depression—which they were manifestly not—should remind us of nothing so much as the last half-dozen global pandemics that never were.

It is not so much that the media are unhelpful to investors seeking to maintain their perspective. Rather—in every thought, word and deed—the media seem single-mindedly determined to stamp perspective out.

At such times, an experienced advisor with an adult memory, a sense of the economic/market cycle and the conviction that this time isn’t different may be the investor’s only practical refuge. Consider the possibility that the highest and best function of an investment advisor isn’t economic commentary or market prognostication, but simply in saving his clients from the media…and from themselves.

© 2009 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

by Robert Stall MD, Geriatrician

If you’re fortunate enough to have one or both parents still living, you may have noticed a role reversal taking place in your relationship. Remember the days when Mom shuttled you to the doctor whenever you were sick? Now, it may be you who’s driving her to her medical appointments. Perhaps you’ve become even more involved in managing her healthcare needs – serving as her healthcare proxy, moving her into your home to care for her, or even having to select a nursing home for her to live in.

Whatever the case, it’s natural to feel challenged – and, yes, intimidated – in the role you’ve undertaken. But if you stay positive and proactive, you’ll be in a great position to advocate for your parents’ optimal care. And, really, what better way is there to say “Thank You” for all they’ve done for you over the years?

The following six recommendations will help you understand what may be happening to your parents as they age – and what you can do to help.

1. Stay vigilant to sudden changes.
Typically, sudden changes arise from sudden problems. Your elderly father who becomes confused one week but was alert and oriented the week before, or becomes unsteady walking and starts falling, is likely experiencing an acute problem – an infection, medication side effect, or perhaps, a heart attack or stroke.

If you pay attention to your parent’s baseline health and behavior, you’ll be alert to sudden, and subtle, fluctuations. Being attuned to what’s “normal” for your parent is critical in advocating for his care. By informing his physician of these changes, you help ensure that he receives a proper diagnosis and timely treatment – especially important in acute conditions.

2. Investigate the source of gradual decline.
Several years ago, I met an elderly woman living in a nursing home. Her family, assuming she had dementia, had moved her there after she had gradually stopped speaking.

After performing a brief procedure on her, I asked how she was doing. “I’m OK,” she replied.

A miracle? Not exactly. I’d removed bullet-sized pieces of wax from her ears. She’d stopped speaking because her ears were too plugged to hear.

A host of conditions can cause gradual decline. Before jumping to the conclusion – as many people do – that Alzheimer’s disease is the culprit, recognize that your parent may be experiencing an altogether different problem: a vitamin B12 deficiency, an underactive thyroid, Parkinson’s disease or depression, to name a few.

When discussing your parent’s decline with her physician, make sure the two of you consider all the possibilities. To prepare for the appointment, make notes detailing how her decline has manifested itself – loss of appetite, a failing short-term memory and so forth – and how long you’ve noticed these changes. That way, you won’t leave anything out. To help you, I’ve created a free checklist that either you or your parent can complete at seniorselfassessment.com – make sure you print or email the “Test Result Details” at the bottom of the page to analyze your responses and give you advice based on your answers.

3. Know thy parent’s medicine cabinet.
Familiarize yourself with the medications your parent takes: what each one is for and how often he takes them. Make sure you notify each doctor your parent visits of all the medicine he takes, including over-the-counter products. Ask what side effects you might observe from each medication and whether it’s potentially dangerous if your parent takes them together. You also want to tell the doctor whether your parent drinks alcohol or caffeinated drinks and whether he smokes, as these substances can affect some medications’ efficacy and safety. To recognize which medications might cause the symptoms your parent experiences, check out  drugscanmakeyousick.com .

4. Discourage ageist attitudes.
Simply put, ageism is prejudice against the elderly. It exists in many forms but can be particularly damaging to an older person’s self-esteem when it assumes that all of her woes are age-related. Here are a couple of ways of expressing ageism to an elderly parent:

“What do you expect at your age?”
“You’re not getting any younger.”

If you’re ever tempted to utter something similar, remind yourself that by chalking up everything that ails her to her age, you sell your parent short. If she’s depressed, it may have nothing to do with the fact that she’s 80 and everything to do with a biological predisposition to depression. And remember that right-knee pain in a 90 year-old can’t be just from age if there’s no problem with her left knee. (More about Dr. Stall and a more in-depth article on the attitude of society towards medical care for the elderly can be found at http://www.longtermcarelink.net/eldercare/medical_care_issues.htm )

5. Address not just symptoms—but emotions, too.
There is disease and then there is “dis-ease” – that is, a lack of ease, security or well-being. “Dis-ease” can manifest itself as myriad emotions in an elderly person: fear, grief, boredom, embarrassment and sadness among them. The fact is, these emotions can be every bit as debilitating as disease.

Take the case of a parent who’s incontinent. Too embarrassed to socialize, she cuts herself off from friends. Without companionship, she becomes lonely. Instead of allowing her to become a hermit, discuss with her doctor how to address the incontinence. Together, you can consider different solutions that will ease her embarrassment and reinvigorate her social life.

6. Strive to maximize your parent’s quality of life.
No matter our age, we all want to enjoy life to the fullest and have the capability to do the things we want to. Improving the enjoyment of life and a patient’s functional ability are the cardinal goals of geriatric care. But you don’t need a medical diploma on your wall to help your parent achieve either of those goals.

Being there to solve a problem or provide company are tremendously worthwhile services you can provide – no expertise required. Remember, as your parent gets older, his quality of life becomes more important to him than how much longer he lives. And he doesn’t necessarily need medications or surgery to ensure that he’s living the latter part of his life to the fullest.

If he enjoys books but has difficulty reading regular-sized type, check out sight-saving titles at the library. If he’s grieving the loss of his best buddy, introduce him to new acquaintances at the senior center. If he’s living in a nursing home, bring your kids there to share a meal with him.

Sometimes, it’s the small gestures that have the most profound impact. As the child of an elderly parent, you are uniquely positioned to deliver these life-changing gifts.

Dr. Robert Stall is a geriatrician practicing in Tonawanda, New York and a clinical associate professor at the University of Buffalo’s School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. He serves as medical director and attending physician at Beechwood Homes in Getzville and Blocher Homes in Williamsville. To learn more about senior care issues, visit his website at stallgeriatrics.com or call 716-213-4345. For information on a new program offering balance assessment and fall prevention tips, call 716-213-0772.

By: Brian Tracy

To deal with change, perhaps the most valuable quality you can develop is flexibility. Form the habit of remaining open-minded and adaptable to new information and circumstances. When things go wrong, as they sometimes will, instead of becoming upset or frustrated, practice looking into the change or reversal for the opportunity or benefit it might contain.

Superior men and women are invariably those who remain calm and keep their wits about them in the midst of unexpected turbulence. They take a deep breath, they relax, and they assess the situation objectively. They keep themselves calm and unemotional by asking questions and seeking information when things don’t work out as they expected. For example, if someone doesn’t fulfill a commitment, or if a sale is canceled, or fails to go through, they keep their minds clear and steady by asking questions, such as “What exactly happened in this situation?” They deal with change by focusing on getting the facts before reacting. They develop the ability to cut through the confusion and ask questions such as “Why did this happen? How did it happen? How serious is it? Now that it has happened, what are the various things we can do?”

The critical issue in dealing with change is the subject of control. Most of your stress and unhappiness comes as a result of feeling out of control in a particular area of your life. If you think about the times or places where you feel the very best about yourself, you will notice that you have a high degree of control in those places. One of the reasons why you like to get home after a trip is that, after you walk through your front door, you feel completely in control of your environment. You know where everything is. You don’t have to answer to anyone. You can relax completely. You are back in control.

With a clear idea of where you’re going and what you want to accomplish, you develop resilience, which is the ability to bounce back rather than to break. You develop what is called the “hardy personality” and become the type of person who is resistant to the negative emotions that affect people who have no goals or direction.

The first step in dealing with any change is simply to accept the change as a reality. Acceptance is the opposite of rejection or resistance. Acceptance keeps your mind calm and positive. The minute you accept that a change has occurred, and that you can’t cry over spilled milk, you become more capable of dealing with the change and turning it to your advantage.

One of the best ways to deal with the worry that is often generated by unexpected changes is to sit down and answer, on paper, the question: “What exactly am I worrying about?”

In medicine, it is said that accurate diagnosis is half the cure. When you sit down and define a worry situation clearly on paper, it suddenly becomes less stressful to you, and it will often resolve itself. In any case, when it is clearly defined, you have diagnosed it, and you can now do something about it.

The second step is to ask yourself, “What is the worst possible thing that can happen in this worry situation?” Much worry and stress comes from the refusal to face what might happen as a result of your difficulty or problem. When you clearly define the worst possible outcome, and write it down next to the definition of the problem, you will find that, whatever it is, you can handle it. Often your worries will begin to evaporate as soon as you have clearly determined the worst that might happen as a result.

Now decide to accept the worst possible outcome should it occur. Mentally resolve that, even if the worst possible consequences ensue from this situation, it will not be the end of the world for you. You will accept it and carry on. In fact, it could probably be a lot worse. The very act of accepting the worst possible outcome completes the cycle of eliminating from your mind the stress and anxiety associated with the situation.

You are now ready for the third step in dealing with change, and that is to adjust your behaviors and actions to the new situation. Ask yourself, “What are all the things I can do to make sure that the worst possible outcome does not occur?” Sometimes we call this “damage control.” In the business schools, this is an important part of decision making, and it is called the “mini-max regret solution.” What can you do to minimize the maximum damage that can occur from an unexpected change or setback? As you begin thinking of all the things you can do, you are adjusting your mind to the new information and preparing to take steps to deal with the change effectively.

The final part of this four-step method for dealing with change is to improve on the existing situation. Often, a change signals that your plans are incomplete or that you might be heading in the wrong direction. Serious changes, which seemingly create real problems, are often signals that you are on the wrong track. There is an old saying, “Crisis is change trying to take place.” If, instead of resisting change, like a pine tree that snaps in a strong wind, you bend with change, like a willow tree, you will often find that the change is a healthy and positive step toward achieving your goals.

W. Clement Stone, the founder of Combined Insurance Company of America, is famous for his attitude of being an “inverse paranoid.” He is convinced that everything that happens is part of a conspiracy to help him to be more successful. Whenever something unexpected occurs, he immediately says, “That’s good!” and then looks into the situation to find out exactly what is good about it.

The mark of a superior person is what is called “tolerance for ambiguity.” This simply means that you have the capacity to deal effectively in a rapidly changing situation. The higher up you gothe greater your income and responsibilities, the higher your status and positionthe faster the rate of change will be around you. At every stage, it will be your ability to function with calmness, clarity and quiet assurance that will mark you as the kind of person who is going places in life. In the final analysis, your ability to perform effectively in a world of ongoing change is the true measure of how well developed a person you really are. And the keys are to accept change, to adjust to change, to improve upon change, and then to move on to the next situation. As you continue to do this, you will have such a wonderful feeling of self-control and self-determination that your whole life will be bright and positive, and so will your results.

About the author:

Brian Tracy is legendary in the fields of management, leadership, and sales.  He has produced more than 300 audio/video programs and has written 28 books, including his just-released book “The Psychology of Selling.” Special offer: To receive your free copy of “Crunch Time!, just visit www.briantracy.com and click on the Crunch Time! icon.  He can be reached at (858) 481-2977 or www.briantracy.com.

Age is going to be an issue in the fall presidential campaign. But are voters more likely to accept a fresh young face or a white-haired fount of experience?

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