5 secrets to a happy retirement-Donna Rosato

Thinkstock

Retirement ought to be a happy time. You can set your own schedule, take long vacations, and start spending all the money you’ve been saving.

And for many retirees that holds true. According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, people tend to start life happy, only to see their sense of well-being decline in adulthood. No surprise there: Working long hours, raising a family, and saving for the future are high-stress pursuits.
Once you reach age 65, though, happiness picks up again, not peaking until age 85. In a recent survey of MONEY readers, 48% retirees reported being happier in retirement than expected; only 7% were disappointed.
How can you make sure you follow this blissful pattern? Financial security helps. And good health is crucial: In a recent survey 81% of retirees cited it as the most important ingredient for a happy retirement. Some of the other triggers are less obvious. Here’s what you can do to make your retirement a happy one.
1. Create a predictable paycheck. No doubt about it: More money makes you happier. Once you amass a comfortable nest egg, though, the effect weakens, says financial planner Wes Moss. For his recent book, You Can Retire Sooner Than You Think: The 5 Money Secrets of the Happiest Retirees, Moss surveyed 1,400 retirees in 46 states. The happiest ones had the highest net worths, but Moss found that money’s power to boost your mood diminished after $550,000.
“Once you reach a certain level, more money doesn’t buy a lot more happiness,” says Moss. Similar research based on the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study found a dropoff in happiness with extreme wealth; after you’ve amassed some $3.5 million in riches, more money doesn’t increase your happiness as much.
Where your income comes from is just as important as how much savings you have, says Moss. Retirees with a predictable income—a pension, say, or rental properties—get more enjoyment from spending those dollars than they do using money from a 401(k) or an IRA.
Similarly, a Towers Watson happiness survey found that retirees who rely mostly on investments had the highest financial anxiety. Almost a third of retirees who get less than 25% of their income from a pension or annuity were worried about their financial future; of those who receive 50% or more of their income from such a predictable source, just under a quarter expressed the same anxiety.
You can engineer a steady income by buying an immediate fixed annuity. According to ImmediateAnnuities.com, a 65-year-old man who puts $100,000 into an immediate annuity today would collect about $500 a month throughout retirement.
2. Stick with what you know. People who work past 65 are happier than their fully retired peers—with a big asterisk. If you have no choice but to work, the results are the opposite. On a scale of 1 to 10, seniors who voluntarily pick up part-time work rate their happiness a 6.5 on average; that drops to 4.4 for those who are forced to take a part-time job.
The benefit of working isn’t just financial. It’s also a boon to your health—a key driver of retirement happiness. The physical activity and social connections a job provides are a good antidote to an unhealthy sedentary and lonely lifestyle, says medical doctor turned financial planner (and Money.com contributor) Carolyn McClanahan .
A 2009 study published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology found that retirees with part-time or temporary jobs have fewer major diseases, including high blood pressure and heart disease, than those who stop working altogether, even after factoring in their pre-retirement health.
Switching careers in retirement, though, isn’t as beneficial. Retirees who take jobs in their field reported the best mental health, says lead researcher Yujie Zhan of Canada’s Laurier University, perhaps because adapting to a new work environment and duties is stressful.
3. Find four hobbies. Busy retirees tend to be happier. But just how active do you have to be? Moss has put a number on it. He found that the happiest retirees engage in three to four activities regularly; the least happy, only one or two. “The happy retiree group had extraordinarily busy schedules,” he says. “I call it hobbies on steroids.”
For the biggest boost to your happiness, pick a hobby that’s social. The top pursuits of the happiest retirees include volunteering, t ravel, and golf; for the unhappiest, they’re reading, hunting, fishing, and writing. “The happiest people don’t do things in isolation,” says Moss.
That’s no surprise when you consider that people 65 and older get far more enjoyment out of socializing than younger people do.
4. Rent late in life. In retirement, as in your working years, owning a home brings you more joy than renting does. But as time goes on, that changes. Michael Finke, a professor of retirement and personal financial planning at Texas Tech University, analyzed the satisfaction of homeowners vs. that of renters from age 20 to 90-plus and found a drop late in life, particularly after homeowners hit their eighties.
The hassles of homeownership build as you age, Finke notes, and a house can be isolating. Most people want to stay put in retirement. Yet, says Finke, “you need to plan for a transition to living in an environment with more social interaction and less home responsibility.”
5. Keep your kids at arm’s length. Once you suddenly have a lot more time on your hands, your closest relationships can have a big impact on your mood. According to an analysis by Finke and Texas Tech researcher Nhat Hoang Ho, married retirees, particularly those who retire around the same time, report higher satisfaction than nonmarrieds—but only if the couple get along well. A poor relationship more than erases the positive effects of being married.
Children don’t make much of a difference, with one twist. Living within 10 miles of their kids leaves retirees less happy. “People overestimate the amount of satisfaction they get from their kids,” says Finke. The reason is unclear—could being a too accessible babysitter be the problem?

Culled from Money in Yahoo Finance

The difficult thing about Pension Marketing-Odunze Reginald C

Pension is the regular sum of money from the state or a former employer after employee’s retirement from service, having put in for a period of 35 years or having attained the mandatory age of 60 years or as a result of disablement or illness.  Pension may be monthly bimonthly or quarterly.

Pension falls into financial services, other financial services include banks, (loans and credit) mortgages, development houses, discount houses, etc. the list can be endless.

There are about characteristics of services, according to Anyanwu (1993), they are as follow:

They are intangible

They are simultaneously produced and consumed

Distinct channel of distribution

Heterogeneous in nature

Lack of inventory

These characteristics of services according to Anyanwu (1993:181) implies that services varies in relation to the supplier, and I will add that even within a supplier, it varies from branches to the other. Continuing he stated that it is very difficult to standardize services due to the elements involved.

Services cannot be stored and as such it is perishable. The way and manner Mr. A attend and deliver his speech or selling points to a customer may be different from Mr. B.

 The varying nature is what creates difficult coupled with the human nature that varies from individual to individual makes it exceedingly difficult to quantify the service delivery of the pension fund administrator.

reginaldodunze.blogspot.com

Recognizing opportunity when it comes-Odunze Reginald C

“Nothing is so great in the world as an idea whose time has come” And according to Robyn Davidson he said that “the two things I did learn were that you as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be and that the most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision”

Opportunity they say comes but once, therefore recognizing that opportunity is a great task and it is the thin line between success and failure.  But people fail because they already defeated within themselves and as such failure is already imminent.

One of such person that recognize the power of idea whose time has come was Bette Nesmith, according to schuller” Bette Nesmith in 1951 was a single parent working as a executive secretary at a bank, she discovered that she makes errors in the type writer; she produced a concoction that she uses to cleaning the errors, the result was a correction fluid. By 1956, she has left the bank to work full time producing and selling the product and by 1979, the Gillette Company bought Nesmith Liquid Paper Corporation for $47.5 Million Dollars.

Opportunity is an invitation to a better development, wealth and education, but it is always difficult to arrive, most people have lost out at a point, they are supposed to be rewarded because they lack that zeal, patience and foresight. They discovered that what they have working hard for is being harnessed by another individual due to impatience.

Therefore the basic issue here is the ability to recognize when that opportunity is scaring you in the face. Will you be able to make that bold move at that crucial decision point?  Will you be found wanting at that point?  Taking the bold steps at the moment of decision is not an easy task.

How then do you recognize opportunity?  Recognizing opportunity requires a lot of hard work, God guidance and the will power, an inner consciousness that makes you away that such idea is a gold mine.  Most opportunity appears most time during a declining time, a time of ebb, and low peak in some one’s life. Suddenly you begin to see light at the tunnel, but will you recognize that light will change your destiny.

reginaldodunze.blogspot.com

INVESTMENT , THE KEY TO SURVIVAL IN OLD AGE- Odunze Reginald

According to several researches, people invest for two basic reasons; they are follows, to make provision for old age and to be wealthy. Being wealthy is a function of the state of mind of the owner and the generosity of the individual.

So many people cling to their money as if their life depends on it. While some are willing to give almost half of their possessions but that is not our subject of discussion.

Venita Van Caspel according to schuller noted  while studying investment “heard a very startling statistics of every people reaching age 65, only 2 percent were financially independent” continuing  Schuller op cited opined that Venita was raised in a Christian home without money, which she claims gave a health respect  for a dollar.

From the startling revelation, it all means that many are bound to fail should they kept deaf ear to investment.

What the article is saying is that apart from your pension contribution, you can also embark on one or two investment instruments to protect your age.

And in embarking on investment, it is wise to consult the professionals in that field, these investment advisers, analyst are able to study trends and be able to make informed decisions to that effect.

reginaldodunze.blogspot.com

Will bond be available to the Millennial in Nigeria? – Odunze Reginald C

Who are the Millennial, according to Millennial Legacy,  “Millennial are the generation born between 1982 and sometime in the early 2000’s. However, these boundaries aren’t set in stone. Some definitions have the Millennial Generation starting as early as 1978 and starting as late as 1985. Basically, if you born a little earlier than 1982 and you consider yourself to be more Millennial than Generation X, that is your opinion. Or if you were born in or just after 1982 and you feel that you are more Gen X than a Millennial, the same applies. It is really up to the individuals born during the cusp years (late 1970’s to early-mid 1980’s) to decide which generation they feel a stronger connection to”

Continuing it stated that “The digital generation is providing some hope for the retirement crisis. After watching their parents suffer through two major financial bubbles and the weakest economic recovery on record, the majority of millennial are placing money aside for retirement — as long as they have a job.”

What is bond, in our own context; bond is the monetary value arrived at by actuarial evaluators due to  a public servant prior to the Pension Reform Act 2004.

These values are calculated and paid to public sector workers as their pension entitlement prior to the commencement of the Act. This with the attribute income and the employees and employers contributions from 2004 to the time of retirement with its attribute income becomes the total pension pot available to the employee.

But the discussion centered on what would be the fate of employee who gains employment in July 2004; will he be entitled to a bond? He or she will not be entitled to bond. As it is believed that government by complying with the relevant sections of the Pension Reform Act 2004 and the amended Pension Reform Act 2014 will have done their own beat as the provision for bond prior to 2004 was because there was no clear cut contribution by the government during those periods prior to 2004. Government was at that time running a defined benefit scheme.

By simple calculation, the first batch of millennial are expected to access their retirement benefit between the period 2039 and 2042. And the real millennial are expected to access their retirement benefit between 2050 and 2060. Will it be enough? Will it match the value of the bond of their predecessors?  This therefore calls for an individual’s calculation of the estimated pension pot based on your expected date of retirement. 

reginaldodunze.blogspot.com