Archives for May 18, 2019

Outliving retirement savings is a huge concern for many Americans, and the worry is not unfounded. According to a Northwestern Mutual survey, 21% of Americans have no retirement savings at all and another 10% have less than $5,000 saved. For some, it may be possible to get back on track by boosting retirement contributions and looking for ways to increase income. But what if you can’t do that?

I’ll be honest with you: There aren’t any options here that involve making large purchases in retirement and sipping drinks on a beach in a foreign country. But with careful planning, you can stretch your money a little further than you expected — maybe even far enough to last the rest of your life.

Here are some suggestions.

Cut expenses

Opportunities to reduce monthly costs may include cooking more at home instead of dining out, downsizing a home, or moving to a more affordable city. You may also want to look for services you can cut back on or eliminate, like that unused gym membership or excess cellphone data you’re not using. Every little bit helps. Put this extra money into savings. If you continue this frugal approach into retirement, you’ll be able to make what savings you have last a little longer.

Consider phased retirement

Phased retirement is where you gradually reduce the number of hours you’re working rather than retiring all at once. This gives you some of the freedom of retirement while you’re still earning income, so you won’t need to draw upon your savings as much in the early years of your retirement.

If your job doesn’t let you work part time, try to find one that does. When you’re ready to begin your transition into retirement, decide how many hours you’d like to work each week. Once you have an idea how much you would get paid, you can see what percentage of your retirement living expenses this would cover and then decide if it’s worth it.

Delay retirement

An alternative to phased retirement is to delay retirement by a couple of years. It will reduce the nest egg you need to cover the rest of your retirement expenses. For example, say you planned to retire at 62 and you’ve determined that you’ll need about $35,000 per year to cover your living expenses. If you delay your retirement until 65, you shave over $100,000 off the amount you need for retirement — and earn money during these extra years in the workforce.

Delay your Social Security benefits

You can begin taking Social Security benefits as early as 62, but for your full benefit, you must wait until your full retirement age — somewhere between 66 and 67 for most adults today. You’ll get the best deal if you can delay your benefits until age 70. At that point, you’ll receive 124% of your scheduled benefit per check if your full retirement age is 67, or 132% if your full retirement age is 66.

By delaying your Social Security benefits as long as you can, you’ll reduce the personal savings you’ll need. But don’t rely too heavily on Social Security. Its trust funds will be depleted in 2034 unless changes are made to the program, and these changes could reduce the value of your Social Security benefits over time.

Reduce your withdrawal rate

Conventional wisdom says you can comfortably withdraw 4% of your retirement savings each year with confidence that doing so will let your money last 30 years or more. If you withdraw less, your savings will last longer — unless your living expenses in retirement make this unfeasible. But if you do what you can to reduce your expenses, a lower withdrawal rate can help in two ways.

First, by taking less money from tax-deferred retirement accounts, your taxable income for the year will be lower and you will owe less to the government. Second, it leaves more money in your retirement accounts to continue growing. 

You may not be able to avoid running out of money in retirement, but by being smart and applying one or more of the above strategies, you can make the most of the savings you do have.

There’s no manual for navigating grief.

The new Netflix NFLX, -1.35% dramedy “Dead to Me” follows Jen (Christina Applegate), a widow from Laguna Beach, who is grappling with grief after her husband is killed in a hit-and-run. She finds herself at a retreat in Palm Springs with her support group sipping margaritas poolside, hitting on a fellow widower during a counseling session and letting loose at a karaoke session.

“I thought there was such a story to tell in giving an escape to people in that amount of pain,” Liz Feldman, the creator and executive producer of “Dead to Me,” tells MarketWatch. She sent the characters on the show to a grief retreat after conversations she had with grief counselors around the country, and based on her own experience with losing loved ones. “It’s an escape for a little bit, but you can’t escape grief,” said Feldman, 41. “It just finds its way back to you.”

Off-screen, millennials are writing their own way of dealing with loss with the help of grief retreats, social media and dinner parties where all of the guests have lost a loved one.

San Francisco-based Rachel Reichblum, 29, lost both of her parents within 14 months of each other. Her father passed away from brain cancer when she was 25. Her mother was diagnosed with the same form of brain cancer and passed away when Reichblum turned 28 and was about to get married.

“It’s not like there’s a packet, ‘Lost a parent? Here’s how you grieve,’ someone gives you,” Reichblum tells MarketWatch.

Finding people she could relate to was a struggle. She was the only one in her friend group who had experienced loss in her 20s, and she wanted a community of people her age she could relate to.

She discovered the blog turned book “Modern Loss,” which was created by Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner, millennials who had both struggled with loss and wanted a resource that wasn’t overtly religious, too clinical or, as their blog describes, “cheesy.”

“Society doesn’t know how to handle grief. It wants you to move on quickly. It makes people uncomfortable, but it’s important to be in a space where your feelings are validated, not brushed under the rug because that will come back to bite you in the ass,” Reichblum says.

She went to grief retreat last year hosted by Soffer of “Modern Loss” and author Emily Rapp Black at The Kripalu Center For Yoga & Health, a nonprofit in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. The three-day package featured a combination of physical and mental exercises like “writing prompts,” hiking and yoga.

“We’re a let it all hang out crowd,” Soffer explains. “There will be humor in this. We will be laughing, and that’s okay.” The four day retreat, happening in July, costs $295 not including lodging (the starting price for a private room at Kripalu costs $185 per night including food, but guests are not obligated to stay on-site). Reichblum says she paid around $600 last year for the retreat and lodging.

Guests participated in writing sessions with prompts asking them to describe their favorite meal with a loved one they lost; or to recall a song or mantra that reminded them of the person close to them who passed away. Reichblum found the writing sessions to be the most therapeutic.

“I had become so fixated on losing stories about my parents. I thought I was going to forget them. It felt so overwhelming,” Reichblum said. “That exercise pulled out those anecdotes in a way that reassured me that they were still in me. They’re not always funny, they’re not always happy, but they feel like a hug.”

The experience motivated Reichblum to start a social conversation around grief. She created the Instagram page @ThatGoodGrief as a healing tool to post photos of her parents, inspirational quotes like, “Do what you can when you can (it’s not a race),” and things she wishes she told her mom and dad before they passed away.

It’s become her own photo journal, inviting others — 5,670 followers — to interact via her “Moving Through” InstaStory, which features the question: “What are you struggling to face without your person?” It lists dozens of responses, like “figuring out life without my husband,” or “that he won’t walk me down the aisle.” She also has posts advice like “6 ways to be a good grief partner.”

“So much of grief happens in your own head that it’s really nice to validate your feelings — not just the ones of sadness, but, ‘Am I crazy for laughing at this thing?’ or, ‘Am I crazy for saying I want to murder this person for saying this?’” Reichblum admits.

Los Angeles-based Carla Fernandez, 31, retreated to the comfort of food and new friends. She built a community after she lost her dad to cancer in 2010 when she was 21. “He was in the wine business, and food and wine has always been a big part of our family heritage. Dinners with him were what I missed the most, ” Fernandez says.

Fernandez wanted a more social way of dealing with loss, asking herself, ‘How do we stop the isolation that comes with grieving?’

She created The Dinner Party, a community of 20 and 30-somethings who have experienced the loss of a parent, partner, child, sibling or other close family member or friend. To join, members pay $35 for the year and get matched to a dinner party table close to where they live. The gatherings are typically monthly, and guests are asked to participate in the potluck-style dinners by brining a dish of their choice.

“The menu includes everything from ‘my mom’s favorite recipe,’ to ‘I’m really stressed, can I bring a six-pack and a pizza?’” Fernandez explains, adding that food became a vehicle to share memories of loved ones. “I know my partner’s mom Sue because I had her lemon thyme cookies and she’s gotten to know my family heritage because I’ll make paella, which is something my dad liked to make. It’s a way to get to know people.”

Dinner starts with people putting the finishing touches on their dishes (homecooked, store-bought or delivered), then everyone introduces themselves.

“We talk about going back to work after a loss, or how a career changes; changing relationships, dating — dating always comes up. ‘What do I do when I’m on a date and someone asks? Do I talk about them in the past tense?’” Fernandez says of the dinner topics.

The success of the group has motivated her to launch her first retreat this year. She’s calling it Dinner Party Camp in Oconomowoc, Wisc. this September. The itinerary for the $350 three-day weekend respite includes light-hearted activities like a “grief dance party,” bonfire, meditation, swimming in the lake; and more serious endeavors like a “mapping your grief journey” session, which asks guests to write about what their grieving process has been like, noting good days and bad.

Psychologists say society has been dismissive of dealing with death, despite being constantly confronted with it on the news and in pop culture with shows like HBO’s T, +0.57% “Game of Thrones.”

Now, younger generations are making the conversation less taboo by building communities around grief instead of isolating themselves or burying their feelings.

“Millennials are more socially connected. Part of this could be longing for more of a community,” Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor emerita of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It’s a general change in culture and it’s also maybe having a generational effect on people who are new to grief.

“We live in a society that has this really bizarre attitude toward death and dying,” she says. “Death is trivialized, but everywhere; it’s constantly in your face. Anytime people can work through these feelings and feel support it’s all good — unless things go off the rails and somebody really breaks down,” Krauss Whitbourne says.

That’s exactly what happens to Jen on “Dead to Me.” By the end of her tequila fueled bender, she breaks down to her friend Judy (Linda Cardellini) about how her life has been destroyed after losing her husband.

“Grief isn’t something that can be fixed or stopped, so for us it’s about ‘how do we stop the isolation that comes with grieving?’” Fernandez says.