Older workers in the workforce

Here are some videos from the PBS website, part of a section called: New Adventures for Older Workers. They show many of the problems older workers face finding employment, and how some of them transcend those problems.

About half of unemployed middle aged and older workers are still unemployed two years later. If you are near retirement and an employer wants to hire you, there’s fixed costs to hiring you. They have to train you. They have to invest in you and if their investment is only going to be spread over a few years then that might not be the best investment for them compared to a worker where that investment might be spread over many more years.

— Julie Zissimopoulos
Economist, University of Southern California

This lady comes out of retirement, and finds work that she's never done before, that transforms her life:



Many older people, well past traditional retirement age, are still working:



More on late-blooming self-starters; "Encore" careers:



The advantages of a geriatric workforce. Here is a company where the median employee age is 74:

I think there’s a kind of sweet spot that’s emerging in life that’s a function of the longevity revolution. So when you’re 50 years old, you have the chance to have a whole new chapter and it’s an extraordinary opportunity for individuals to have another chance to do something important.
— Marc Freedman Founder, Encore.org

It seems that some of the oldest folks, 65 and older, who had to come out of retirement and start working again, have had even more success. It's interesting to see the different approaches that different people of different ages take, and the varying degrees of success they enjoy.
     

Interesting Links about Aging, Working, Retirement or not Retiring

An 8.3 Percent Return for Life, Guaranteed: Real or Imagined?

[...] In finance, the word "annuity" refers to a series of payments made to a person (called the "annuitant") for life or for a set number of periods. In this post we refer to a fixed, life annuity, a plain vanilla annuity that will guarantee a set income each month for the rest of your life, no matter how long you live or what dumb mistakes you make along the way. If this guarantee looks familiar, it should, since it is pretty much what we get from Social Security as well as from a traditional "defined benefit" pension -- if we are lucky enough to have one. Both are forms of life annuities because both pay until you die. [...]

I've been curious about annuities. This article has a large question and answer section, which explains a lot.

New Adventures for Older Workers
Has lots of facts, figures and links about the subject matter; retirement, coming out of retirement, working indefinitely, making it in rural areas, all sorts of things. Videos, with interviews of various people in various situations.

How Social Security Pays You to Work Forever

[...] How long do I intend to "work"? Hopefully, right up to my last day on earth. And, as if I didn't have enough good reasons to work, Social Security, it turns out, adds a significant incentive for doing so. The longer you work, the larger your Social Security benefits. This is due to Social Security's "Recomputation of Benefits" provision. Here's how it works -- for all of us older cowpokes who remain in the saddle indefinitely.

Each year you work, you add to your earnings record, leading Social Security to automatically recalculate your benefits. If you are interested, here are the gory details.

In a nutshell, Social Security averages your highest 35 years of earnings to calculate your Average Indexed Monthly Earnings or AIME. Then it plugs your AIME into a formula that figures out your full retirement benefit, called your Primary Insurance Amount (PIA). What benefits you can get for yourself and your spouse (including your ex-spouse(s) and your children, if they are young enough or are disabled) is all pegged to your PIA.

From age 16 on, Social Security considers all your earnings, up to a ceiling that rises from year to year. It then indexes, based on historic wage growth, all earnings through the year you turn 60.

In other words, Social Security adjusts past earnings upward to account for the growth in the economy. But after age 60, you get credit for your earnings without any adjustment at all. So imagine that there's a sudden surge in inflation and wages after age 60 skyrocket. They're going to look spectacular compared to your wages of the past, even though they've been indexed. And here's the kicker. Social Security bases your benefits on your highest 35 years of earnings.

So now imagine that age 30 was the lowest of those 35 years and you made, say, $40,000, even after indexing. But now inflation takes off and you're suddenly making $200,000, even though $200,000 ain't what it used to be.

But for your Social Security benefits, this is a bonanza. You're suddenly being treated as if you were really earning a lot more, and thus deserving of much higher benefits. So, for every year that your post-60 earnings exceed the lowest of the previous 35 years, bingo! You'll raise your Social Security check (or checks, if your dependents are also collecting). [...]

He continues on, using himself and his earnings as an example. Wow.

Recommendation No. 1 for a Secure Retirement: "Age in Place"

[...] Owning an accessible home in which we can age in place is important to keeping our future core expenses down for many reasons. First, and most obvious, owning a home outright in retirement greatly reduces our need for income since we no longer have to pay the mortgage.

In the United States, paying as much as 40 percent of your income for housing has been considered normal. Many of us did this when we were young with growing families and growing incomes. Think of how much better we could have done if we had owned our homes, outright, through our adult lives. In many cases, by not making mortgage payments, our housing-related expenses could have been cut by 75 percent or more.

Contrary to what others may have told us, our standard of living in retirement is not based on what we make or what we spend. Rather, it is based on what we spend and the benefits we get from the things that we own outright such as housing, cars, appliances, furniture and clothing. Economists call the income that we get from owning our homes and other possessions outright, and not having to pay rent on them, "implicit income." Since we already own so much of what we use in retirement (home, car, furniture, appliances, clothes), the income that we will need to comfortably support ourselves in retirement may be far, far less than the income we earned while we were working and paying for all of these things. So much for fear-mongers who insist that we must have cash retirement income equal to 70 percent of our pre-retirement income! That is just not true.

A second major benefit of owning, outright, an age-in-place home is that it is a wonderful hedge against inflation. Some of our older readers will remember the double-digit inflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, where costs (including the costs of renting a home) could double in six or seven years. If we own our retirement home outright, or have a fixed-rate mortgage, which I will deal with below, most of our housing costs are protected against inflation and the value of the home is also likely to increase. While there are other ways of protecting against inflation (see my last column on inflation-protected annuities), the cost of inflation-protection is high. Rather than pay for inflation protection, we can save money by reducing our core expenses that are subject to inflation. Much of this can be done by owning a paid-up, low-maintenance, energy-efficient age-in-place home.

Aside from the financial benefits of reducing cash flow needs and hedging against inflation, another huge saving from having an age-in-place home is likely to be the reduction or elimination of very expensive nursing home costs in the future. With an age-in-place home, an incapacitated spouse or single person may be able to live in a comfortable, familiar environment with some outside help for a long period of time at a fraction of the cost of a nursing home. Staying at home can also reduce the need for increasingly expensive long-term care insurance whose maximum daily benefits are often just $150 or so, a fraction of nursing home costs, leaving patients and their families to make up the huge difference. [...]

The article also goes into reverse mortgages and many other things. A good resource to read.

I'll probably be referring back to many of these links. Good stuff to know.
     

Who are the majority of today's Entrepreneurs?

Would you believe, it's mostly the older folks?

Buying a business after 50

[...] Americans 55 to 64 have launched more businesses than any other age group during the past decade, closely followed by those 45 to 54, reports the Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to entrepreneurship.

For some, the change has been forced upon them by the tough job market. Others are taking the leap to escape boredom, become their own boss, pursue a passion -- or simply in hopes of hitting it rich.

Whatever the motivation, entrepreneurs face a tough road. Half of businesses fail within the first five years, the U.S. Small Business Administration reports. Some research shows that boomerpreneurs have more staying power than younger folks, but the stakes are also higher: You have little time to recover from failure, you have higher living expenses to cover, you may have a family depending on your income, and though you've likely amassed more wealth, you're closer to the time when you need to tap those assets.

So how can you beat the odds if you want to join the boomerpreneur boom? MONEY put that question to small-business experts and dozens of fiftysomething entrepreneurs for their best advice.

This is the first of three articles on how to become a boomerpreneur. This one will help you to see if you've got what it takes to own your own business and how to put time on your side. You can also get tips for changing your lifestyle, knowing the real costs of starting up a business and financing with caution. [...]

Well it makes sense to me. Older folks have gained more experience managing finances, interacting with many different kinds of people, and generally understanding how the world works. Plus, they may have saved up some cash and other resources to live on, while they are growing their business. All that would give them an edge.

Read the full article, for embedded links and more.
     

Using physical, mental and social skills all help keep mind and memory sharp

For a Healthy Aging Brain, 'Use It or Lose It'
Social, Mental, and Physical Engagements Help Maintain Memory

[...] Although some memory decline is inevitable with age, the research now shows this decline to be highly variable from person to person.

Imaging studies also confirm that the brains of older people with no evidence of memory loss more closely resemble those of much younger people than their memory-impaired contemporaries.

This suggests that avoiding the changes linked to memory decline, rather than trying to "fix" declines that already exist, may be the key to successful aging, the researchers write.

"There is quite solid evidence that staying physically and mentally active is a way toward brain maintenance," says researcher and Umea University professor of neuroscience Lars Nyberg.

This "use it or lose it" message is not new, but the review highlights a shift in thinking about brain health in the elderly, says Pepperdine University psychology professor Louis Cozolino, PhD, who in 2008 published the book, The Healthy Aging Brain: Sustaining Attachment, Attaining Wisdom.

"The brain is a very complex organ, with many different systems," he tells WebMD. "Some of these systems start to decline in the third or fourth decade of life and others actually function better with age."
Engage Socially and Physically

Although our genes certainly play a role in how our brains age, it is now clear that our social interactions do, too, especially new interactions, Cozolino says.

"Social relationships stimulate the neurochemistry of the brain to help it stay healthy," he says. "One formula for sustained brain health is continuing to engage in social adaptation."

On the other hand, social isolation can cause accelerated brain aging, he says.

"If you want your brain to deteriorate, just watch TV all day and don't do anything else."

Garrett, who almost never watches television, agrees.

"There are two kinds of people -- those who walk into a room and turn the television on and those who walk into a room and turn it off," he says. "I turn it off."

Though Garrett certainly has good genes -- his mother lived independently until two years before her death at age 96 -- his days also include lots of social interaction. [...]

I can find too much social interaction tiring. But I find too much TV tiring, too. I like to read and study, which I'm sure also helps keep the brain sharp. I suppose there is a balance to be found, that's just right for each person. But I suppose it still comes down to the wise old adage, "use it or lose it".
     

No more magic: "Why should I get a ham license just so that I can talk to a bunch of old geezers about their latest heart bypass operations?"

I recently read this in a thread in the QRZ forums. Has radio lost it's "magic" for the younger generation? Is amateur radio a dying hobby? I'm not certain, but here is an argument that makes some interesting points about it:

Thread: Why Ham Radio Endures in a World of Tweets

[...] I'm not arguing the point that our numbers are "up" a bit from a few years ago. And I certainly hope that positive trend continues.

But, as I've also said, nowhere in any of those figures is the AGE of those licensees noted.

And what's also disturbing is the fact that there are now some 700,000 licenses (696,302 to be exact) that are due to expire in the United States between now and June of 2018. That number is roughly equivalent to the ENTIRE database of currently licensed US hams. Remember, our licenses are all on a ten year renewal cycle. So, if we were "holding our own" it should follow that the number of license renewals should be spread out over ten years, not seven.

Or, to put it another way, for some reason, the number of expiring licenses now appears to be "front end loaded" with a significant number of those license expirations occurring in the next four or five years. Could this be yet another indication that a growing number of US hams are either not renewing (or upgrading) their licenses, or that more and more of them are now dying and their survivors haven't (yet) notified the FCC of that fact? Remember...the ARRL has already reported that the rate of new license grants (for all classes of licenses in the United States) is also slowing...down some 13% from 2008.

However, I suggest you don't take my word for it. Rather, you may want to visit Joe Speroni's (AHOA) FCC Amateur Radio Statistics Web site and do your own analysis of these data:

http://www.ah0a.org/FCC/index.html

And while the "jury is still out" as to whether (or not) these numbers indicate that our hobby is expanding or shrinking, I think the anecdotal evidence that we are slowly aging and dying is now all around us. For example, I invite you to go to any hamfest, club meeting or other amateur radio gathering these days and take note of the preponderance of graying (or balding!) heads (and rapidly expanding waistlines) of the participants. Then, I dare you to tell me we are attracting significant numbers of youthful newcomers.

That is, while we may now be attracting significant numbers of "codeless" retirement age newcomers, it is an inescapable fact that those people, too, will eventually age and die. And, by the laws of nature, these retirement-age newcomers will be dying off far sooner than their more youthful counterparts.

What's more, all the evidence I've seen (anecdotal and otherwise) shows that the vast majority of the youngsters of today who will eventually "grow old" aren't showing the slightest interest whatsoever in becoming hams when they do.

Maybe that's because, for most of us in our hobby today, radio is "magic". It's the idea that something we do in our shacks (or with our own voice or fingers) can be heard (or felt) at a distance without wires. But, how many other ways (besides Ham Radio) can youngsters of today do that? Indeed, how many youngsters of today have even HEARD of amateur radio?

Here's another example: Back last fall, I was honored to be part of a ham radio demonstration station at a local Boy Scout camporee. However, once we got everything set up and working, we very quickly discovered that our biggest problem in explaining what we were doing was in finding a common reference point with which to describe our hobby. For starters, we were absolutely flabbergasted that our attempts to contrast what we do with CB drew mostly blank stares! Indeed, most of these (largely urban-based) Scouts had never heard of CB!

It was only after we hit on a comparison of what we do to the Internet, MSN and Facebook (except that we do it all without wires!) were we able to get even the faintest glimmer of understanding.

But even then, we mostly got yawns and "can we go now"? from the bulk of these elementary and junior high school youngsters. One of my compatriots later (and quite rightly) noted that if we had been offering military face painting (like the Army exhibit next door) we might have gotten more interest.

So, as I see it, one of our other recruitment and retention problems (that is, besides maintaining an absolutely arcane, 1950s-era licensing and regulatory system that included such things as psycho-motor tests for Morse well into the 21st Century) is that "radio" is no longer magical for these youngsters. And I contend that its the "magic" of radio that brought a lot of us into the hobby back in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and even into the 70s...despite our systemically discriminatory, "incentive licensing" system in the United States. What's more, it's that "magic" that is probably also what has since kept many of us active in the hobby today.

But the truth is that those days are now LONG GONE! And they aren't coming back. Indeed, "radio" (in a dizzying array of forms and formats) has now moved into the mainstream of our society. As a result, most youngsters today take the "radio" that's implied in their cell phones, PDAs, satellite televisions, and MP3 players for granted.

Indeed, I've continually asked my 18-year-old daughter if she would be at all interested in getting her ham license...if for no other reason that it might look good on a resume someday. Her consistent reply to me over the years (while she was usually busy texting her friends on her cell phone) has been, "Why should I get a ham license just so that I can talk to a bunch of old geezers about their latest heart bypass operations?"

Yes, Emily, why indeed?

Clearly (and unlike our older generation) for the younger set, the medium is no longer the message. Increasingly, its the message that has now become the message and most youngsters of today could absolutely care less how that message gets into (or out of) the wired or wireless devices they now routinely hold in their hands.

In many ways, I think we've now become victims of our own success. Others in these forums have (rightly) noted that amateur radio was, in many ways, the first "Internet" and, indeed, many of the early handshaking protocols of that medium were first used by hams.

But the truth is that the rest of the communications world around us (both sociologically and technologically) has LONG SINCE moved on. As I've also said, increasingly we in ham radio are viewed by the younger set as the "Radio Amish", a quaint, ancient holdover from the early days of radio. And for today's youngsters, the "early days" increasingly means before there were such things as high speed wireless Internet, MSN, Facebook, satellite and cable television, PDAs and Internet-capable cell phones.

THIS is why I'm not holding out much hope that attracting retirement-age "oldsters" is going to sustain our ranks (let alone grow them!) over the long term.

To the contrary, everything I've experienced, seen and read indicates that the best and brightest youth of today have little interest in someday pursuing a hobby that, for them, is not (and never has been) "magical". So my hunch is that they probably won't be interested in doing so when they reach retirement age unless WE somehow figure out a way to make it so.

And sadly, (and as I noted earlier) some of us are now simply too busy "having fun enjoying this wonderful hobby" to care much about the future of same.

The bottom line here is that, while I sincerely hope that I'm absolutely wrong in all of this, I still cannot help but conclude that interest in our hobby WILL continue to fade as those of us who still view radio as "magic" continue to age and die in ever increasing numbers.

And despite a lot of verbal arm waving and emotional "say it isn't so" appeals (not to mention boorish personal attacks) from some people in these forums, I still find it interesting that nobody has (yet) offered a single shred of credible evidence to dispute any of my predictions.

Clearly, as time goes on (and unless the current perception of our hobby rapidly changes among the youth of today), there are going to be fewer and fewer youthful newcomers down the road to take our places as we, too, eventually go the way of the dinosaur. [...]

Today's youth are not impressed by "old" technology. Yet I think there is some renewed interest in amateur radio for EmComm (Emergency Communications: "When all else fails"), and the newer technologies like digital radio modes, and "air" mail, etc. The technology that ham radio uses and interacts with is constantly evolving.

I think the demographics of licensees are changing as well. Many of the members of my local radio club are women, almost half the membership. They have their own "YL" net where they meet once a week and chat about things that interest them.

For all the talk about kids not being interested in radio, there are exceptions. The ARISS program (Amateur Radio from the International Space Station) has been very popular with children in schools that participate in making space contacts. Other space related things like Moonbounce (a.k.a. "EME", Earth-Moon-Earth) communications are much easier to do now thanks to cheaper hardware, the internet and software. There are also a growing number of DX contest competitions that some would enjoy.

Some kids at one of our local schools expressed an interest in learning Morse Code, because it's faster than text messaging. Some schools now incorporate ham radio into their science curriculum, and encourage their students to get licensed as part of their learning.

As the people who are using amateur radio, and the reasons they are using it continue to change, interest in amateur radio may also change accordingly. But whether any of that will be enough to attract ham licensees in significant numbers in the future remains to be seen. I wouldn't give up hope just yet though; it's an evolving situation.

For me, it remains an interesting world of possibilities.


Also see:

Radio Communications in a Changing World

Learning Ham Radio; start with a Police Scanner?

The ARRL, my missed opportunity, and my fun new hobby

Oregon Emergency Amateur Radio in Action

How I passed the Ham Radio Technician's Test

Shortwave Radio Nostalgia for a Sunday

Nostalgia for "tube" radios, a.k.a. "boat anchors"

The convergence of Ham Radio with the Internet