Some good money reads from around the Web.
A strength of blogs (present company excepted!) is how they snappily zero in on the tastiest morsel in a smorgasbord of geeky data.
Update: This data is apparently an urban myth! Another strength of the Internet is its ability to spread information regardless of their truth, so let’s put the brakes on this one. Thanks to reader Tony who pointed to this rebuttal from Boeing.
Such was the case on Five Cent Nickel this week, which trawled this piece of writing on longevity [PDF] for one arresting table.
It shows how Boeing Aerospace workers who retired later died sooner:
| Retirement Age | Age at Death |
|---|---|
| 49.9 | 86.0 |
| 51.2 | 85.3 |
| 52.5 | 84.6 |
| 53.8 | 83.9 |
| 55.1 | 83.2 |
| 56.4 | 82.5 |
| 57.2 | 81.4 |
| 58.3 | 80.0 |
| 59.2 | 78.5 |
| 60.1 | 74.5 |
| 61.0 | 74.5 |
| 62.1 | 71.8 |
| 63.1 | 69.3 |
| 64.1 | 67.9 |
| 65.2 | 66.8 |
(Source: “Actuarial study of life span vs. retirement age” by Ephrem Cheng)
As blog author Nickel says:
Perhaps the scariest bit of data here is that those that work through the traditional retirement age of 65 only cash their retirement checks for an average of 17 months.
17 months!
Is that what you have in mind when you think about your future? That your “retirement years” will be reduced to little more than a “retirement year”?
One chunk of data does not a systematic review make: Boeing staff might have been particularly over-stressed, younger retirees might have been extra healthy (and they almost certainly were extra-wealthy, which has all kinds of positive impacts on lifespan).
Still, if jobs were a food additive, then going on this data they wouldn’t make it past the rat-slaughtering lab tests.
From the money blogs
- Job loss = job creation – Investing Caffeine
- Liquidity risk in the good times and bad – Swedroe/MoneyWatch
- The evolution of personal investing – Rick Ferri
- The Golden Girls solution to retirement – Steve Vernon
- The case for a small cap and value tilt – Oblivious Investor
- Fooled by fluency – The Psy-Fi blog
- The right weight for Glencore – The Munro Blog
- Discovering Benjamin Graham (on Kindle!) – A Grain of Salt
- Beware of buying into tech IPO hysteria – The Portfolioist
- …especially as the market hates them older [Chart] – Business Insider
- The complete history of oil since 1861 [Chart] – Business Insider
- Is there an easy way to earn six figures online? – The Digerati Life
Mainstream media stories
- Irradiation and E. Coli – The Economist
- Is volatility a contrary stock market indicator? – New York Times
- The dangers of a retail banking ring-fence – Peston/BBC
- Wealth managers are bad for your…wealth [told you!] – Motley Fool
- Berkshire Hathaway the cheapest it’s been for decades – Motley Fool
- China investors can’t see the wood for the trees – FT
- Super-prime London property sales surge – FT
- ‘ABC’ fund safety labeling even more confusing, postponed – FT
- New breed of annuities to account for deteriorating health – FT
- FSA urges “extreme caution” over schemes to unlock pensions early – FT
- Fidelity admits headline index fund fee is 1/3 of true cost – Telegraph
- Post Office’s potential NS&I beater (but it’s taxed) – Telegraph (more)
- How to use power of attorney to protect your finances – Independent
- The way we eat now – The Independent
- [Risky] higher-yield pseudo-bonds for green investors – The Guardian
- 39th President Jimmer Carter: End the global drugs war – New York Times
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Although the conclusions square pretty exactly with my aims of retiring at 55, I challenge this paper (I’ve only looked at the source PDF) and its conclusions on the grounds that correlation does not equal causation. There could be other factors that mean people more likely to live longer retire earlier.
I would favour the obvious alternative view – you can retire earlier if you are more wealthy. Other studies have shown that being poor correlates with other lifestyle choices that are not conducive to living longer.
Mind you, the summary that you are at your most creative and dynamic at 32 +/- 5 years and burned out as a corporate employee by 50+ does square with my experience. Perhaps the proposed extensions to the retirement age are deliberate plan to improve the demographic profile in future decades without having to resort to Soylent Green 😉
Have never seen that film! I was thinking Logan’s Run, but that’s a bit more of a blissful sci-fi ageist horror story…
Agree with your points, as per my comments after the table. Still, it’s pretty striking.
There appears to be no satisfactory consensus on this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4358244.stm
You might retire earlier because you are wealthier or unhealthier and as ermine implies lots of confounding variables and dependencies.
@ Salis – so the ideal scenario seems to be to jack in the rat race at 60 with the freedom to pick the stimulating part-time work of your choice that acts as a kind of mental dialysis machine.
Great phrase! This is pretty much my plan, give or take a decade. I had a crack at not having any obligations a few years ago, at least for a bit, and I wouldn’t do it again, although it wasn’t an ideal test. (One minute I was striving along in a start-up, the next minute I’d sold out and was visiting the Tate at 2pm wondering whether to travel…)
> more of a blissful sci-fi ageist
You been doing that sci-fi thing again. No good will come of it 🙂
Watched it as a teen, Jenny Agutter was definitely blissful ISTR…
> the next minute I’d sold out and was visiting the Tate at 2pm wondering whether to travel…
err… I think the wise money is on a gradual downshift from the rat-race to retirement. There are some things where cold turkey is the only way, but people in the West who are dynamic enough to flog a startup probably have got all sorts of deep culturally embedded Calvinist subtext as well as quitting something that they have lived and breathed for a couple of years to deal with.
@TA
>mental dialysis machine
is so poetic, in a grisly sort of way!
Interesting discussion – maybe one answer is to retire but then blog?
Since I took early retirement recently, although frankly loving the freedom, I have found I am becoming physically less active and also less mentally stimulated (even with 2 teenagers to deal with). My solution (part of the plan) is to look for freelance work with my former employer to add a little spice. And blogging, of course.
It’s a fair cop, guv! 😉
It was actually even more convoluted, because *I* sold out rather than we sold up (i.e. I sold most of my shares to my partners) who were all friends, and who I couldn’t agree on the way forward with. Somewhat trying.
Also, while “sell” and “start-up” inevitably makes one think of dotcom millionaires turning into venture capitalists or more down-to-earth moguls moving into Dubai property development, I should reiterate (I’ve discussed elsewhere on Monevator) that I didn’t cash out to a yacht! Far from it. But I could have had a couple of years on a fairly low-fi beach. And I kept a small stake.
My friends (and we are still friends, happily) read the blog now and then, so I won’t say much more.
True it’s not the same as getting the last train home with the gold carriage clock at 65.
@MoneyMan – Yes, I think that’s what I’d do. Enough work to keep a bit of ‘eustress’, but not so much that you remember every morning why you retired early!
Something that involves people is probably ideal. I’ve a feeling it’s the social isolation that is part of the problem, especially for men (who probably drive the stats to-date, given the predominance of men in the full-time working population to-date).
Sadly this data is not correct, and is something of an urban myth, so much so that Boeing have issued a PDF refuting the data and th conclusion (though the PDF in question is just as confusing as the original data!)
http://www.boeing.com/companyoffices/empinfo/benefits/pension/seminars/Rumor.pdf
Tony
Thanks Tony — I’ve updated the article above with a note pointing to the Boeing knock back.