When you were in your 50s, you may have joined a very select group of people by buying a long term care policy. It may have seemed like the ideal way to keep control of the prohibitive costs of long term care. And when you were in your 50s, it probably was.
AgingOptions
Has technology prepared you for the role of caregiver?
Nearly forty percent of American adults provide care for sick or elderly relatives according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life project and those caregivers have become heavy technology users.
Health blurbs in the news
Here are some mostly unrelated news items from this week about saving health care dollars, getting an expert opinion and avoiding medication problems when the grandchildren visit.
James Gandolfini’s Killer has powerful accomplices: Misinformation and the status quo
This is a guest blog from Dr. Robert Emerick, the Founder, President and Interventional Cardiologist at Choice Cardiovascular, a direct practice (also called concierge medicine or boutique medicine). Dr. Emerick’s website can be found at http://www.choicecardiovascular.com/.
James Gandolfini, well known to many of us as the likeable, yet brutal and sociopathic, family man, modern-day don of the HBO drama, The Sopranos, collapsed suddenly last Wednesday night in his Rome hotel bathroom.
When claiming early might be the best strategy
I recently wrote a white paper on survivor benefits. One of the points I made in the paper was that dependent children (up to age 19 if he or she is still attending high school) of a deceased parent can claim Social Security benefits. And because I was writing about the benefits that a worker’s survivors are eligible for I didn’t cover the benefits of workers claiming benefits but still very much alive. In fact, the one time it might truly be beneficial for someone to begin collecting benefits early is if they have dependent children.
How your Social Security benefits are impacted if you return to work
You can work while receiving Social Security retirement benefits. And doing so can mean a higher benefit for you in the future. While you are working though, your earnings will reduce the amount of your benefit until you reach your full retirement age at which point there is no penalty for earning a wage.
Phasing into retirement: Is it for you?
Some people think that they will work “until they drop” and others can’t wait to “take this job and shove it” but there’s another option for people in the middle and not quite interested in giving up the benefits or the pay or even the relationships but still wanting to slow down a bit and take in all the grandkids baseball games or spend some time travelling and fishing.
The importance of sleep in healthy aging
When I was a child, my then 26-year old aunt died, unexpectedly and suddenly. She simply felt tired, lay down and never got up again. My family was quite disbelieving that foul play hadn’t happened and so we did something most families don’t’ do when someone dies. We had an autopsy performed. When that didn’t find anything, we had another one performed and finally a third. What all this is leading up to is that because my aunt died, my family knows it has a tendency towards sleep apnea.
Social Security’s family benefits
Once you have filed for Social Security benefits, other members of your family may be eligible for benefits as well.
Understanding Social Security's Totalization Agreement
Social Security tax is non-refundable, meaning that if someone from another country pays into the U.S. system but never qualifies for benefits, it isn’t possible to get a refund of the taxes paid. As more and more large companies become multinational and their employees work overseas, a growing number of individuals have emerged who don’t work for a long enough period in a foreign country under that country’s Social Security program and therefore may “lose” their contributions.