The Art 2 Aging

Wills and estates.

Alongside life insurance, wills and estates are two things most people don’t want to think about, let alone do any planning around what happens to their assets when they die.

This is why 68% of Americans and about 50% of Canadians will give their heirs lots of headaches at death.

This week, The Art 2 Aging takes a very practical look at wills, estates, estate planning and death taxes.

We have engaged the expertise of a top financial planner in Toronto, Canada to help navigate the ins and outs of all this.

Even though tax and estate laws may vary from country to country, at a high level the financial concepts and strategies are very similar, if not identical.

This is vital content to know if you own anything, let alone anything of value!

How many of us are working in jobs or professions that no longer fulfill us?

Plenty.

But most of us don’t see a way out; we need to continue to work for the paycheck, to support our families, to pay our bills.

What we yearn for, while heading off each morning to a job that leaves us feeling empty, is an inner sense of meaning.

James Adams felt that way. He was a senior marketing executive with decades of experience, an entrepreneur in the food industry, and he was fed up.

So in his 60s, he embarked on perhaps the greatest risk of his profesinal life. He quit.

Walked away from his career.

Took up meditation and along the way began to find himself again.

He now teaches it to what he calls “forward thinking companies”.

James is our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging.

The NBA kicked off its 79th season this past Tuesday, for those of you who are into basketball.

In 79 years, the game has come a long, long way. It’s a truly international sport, the seventh most popular game in the world, according to World Atlas.

The NBA itself is international in terms of team rosters with 125 players from 40 different countries outside the United States donning team jerseys this season.

But we’ll bet that the league has only seen one foreign player who is related to the Russian literary giant, Leo Tolstoy.

And that man is Tom Meschery, whose own journey to fame rivals that of his famous uncle and the subject of our encore episode this week on The Art 2 Aging.

Did you know that 50% of American men between 65 and 74 take statins?  How about women? Try 39% of women 75 and older.

There are a further 8 million people in the UK who take statins at a cost of 100 million pounds a year to the National Health Service.

What is going on? Do statins even work? Or are they just another drug to make Big Pharma even wealthier?

Well, this week, we’re going to deep dive into statins to see if they in fact work. To do that, we have brought back a former guest, Australian cardiologist Dr. Warrick Bishop.

And what he will tell you about statins, cholesterol, and heart health may amaze you.

What does retirement look like for you? Have you thought about what you’ll do with all that time on your hands?

All too often, we are told what a ‘retirement age’ should be and then we are shown images of retired people enjoying long walks along beaches or lounging poolside on a cruise ship – in other words, we are almost spoon-fed stereotypes by marketing and advertising agencies.

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging begs to differ and she has the research to back up her contrarian views of what retirement is, when it should occur and why. Susan Bell is an Australian market researcher who has done her own in-depth market research and what she has to say about retirement is a breath of fresh air blowing through a room filled with stale air.

So, you’re 53 years old and you get fired without warning. What do you do? Well, if you’re Gail Mercer-Mackay, you don’t panic. You go to Arizona to play golf for two weeks and do some serious journaling as well.

What Gail discovered (besides still having a slice) was that she wanted to be a writer. Long story short, she did become a writer and founded a content creation company in the process.

Today, the company routinely earns revenue in the millions and at the age of 69, Gail is still going strong.

Hear her story this week on The Art 2 Aging.

How should we be looking at aging in the 21st century?

There are a lot of ways we could tackle that question.

We could come at it from the point of view of health and medical breakthroughs occurring continually around longevity.

We could examine the question by considering whether or not we shift our thinking around retirement.

Or, like our guest this week, we take on all of the challenges and throw in the elephant in the room – ageism – at the same time.

Helen Hirsh Spence is a retired Canadian educator, TedX Talks speaker, writer and blogger whose excellent website, TopSixtyOverSixty is packed with information on ageing in the 21st century.

Nearly 30 years ago, a University of Toronto professor named David Foot wrote a book called Boom, Bust and Echo.

The book dealt with how the global population was aging and how savvy investors could profit from the graying trend that would become a tidal wave. In fact, Foot referred to it in terms akin to those of a tidal wave.

The book was a best seller. 30 years ago. Foot wasn’t blowing smoke; everything that he said would come to pass, did.

So, if he knew this and wrote a book about it, why are we still struggling to build enough retirement residences, long term care facilities and find the staff to run them? Why is funding for services for older people in such short supply? Why are employers pushing out older workers in favor of young, inexperienced employees?

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging is the CEO of a Canadian advocacy group called CanAge. Laura Tamblyn Watts outlines the parameters of what  is an enormous challenge for governments, the public sector and the private sector as well.

A note: we apologize for the audio quality at the time the interview was recorded.

Janice Walton and her husband, Dan, were married for more than 60 years. They made every decision, planned every holiday together.

For six decades.

They raised their two kids together, providing them with a safe and secure home environment.

Dan was the love of Janice’s life when, overnight, their world went pear-shaped.

He began to experience signs of dementia. Janice found herself thrust into a role she was ill prepared for – that of a fulltime caregiver.

Then, Dan needed surgery. And after the surgery, his mind began to spin away even faster, to the point where Janice had to find a memory facility for him.

The facility was hit with Covid during the pandemic; Dan became infected and died.

Suddenly, for the first time in her adult life, she was alone.

This is a very personal story but one that is not unique. It’s the story of a spouse hurled into the role of caregiver with no roadmap as a guide.

To try and deal with her grief, Janice began to write. A lot. Today, at the age of 85, she is the author of one book and a newsletter, Aging Well, on Substack.

Janice shares much of her story this week on The Art 2 Aging.

Baby boomers have grown up with technology. We’ve seen enormous change over the past seven decades. It’s staggering what has transpired since the days of telephone “party” lines in homes, rotary dial phones,  two or three TV channels via an outside antenna – the list goes on.

So, it’s always odd to hear someone who is NOT a baby boomer make the assumption that older people are clueless about technology. We’re not.

But what can baffle us is the complexity of technology today. Which baffles many who are much younger, too.

It is difficult to stay on top of authenticator apps, IPTV apps (and how to configure them), two or three step ID security systems, modems, ethernet, etc. The technology is always changing and tricky to master.

Ezra Schwartz is a UX developer with more than 30 years experience designing interfaces that are clear and simple. His major complaint with technology – the industry in which he makes his living – is that apps and software platforms have become so complex that they are leaving many older people on the sidelines. He’s our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging and he explains what’s wrong and how to fix it.

Correction: Ezra Schwartz is a UX designer; he is not a UX developer. Our apologies to Ezra!