So Baby Boomer: Life Tips

For Boomer Grandmothers on Mother's Day

Did you know that you are one of the 58% of grandparents in the U.S. who are boomers?

That's right, more than 27 million boomer grandparents are best friends with their grandkids...probably due to the fact that they both have one enemy in common. These boomer grandparents are probably living close to one or more of their grandchildren and spending as much time with them as possible.

Today, grandmotherhood is radically different from motherhood because when you become a grandmother you realize very quickly you have no control, no say in anything.  Exploring these grandmotherly emotions and experiences is the theme of a new book by 27 grandmother writers who reveal the hidden pleasures of being a grandmother.

If you are a grandparent, you have probably talked with grandparent friends who told you their stories of connecting with their grandchildren.  In past generations, it was over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house they went.  However, since our children are spread all over the country and even the world, today's grandparents mostly travel to where the children live. 

Reading about real stories from these two dozen plus grandmother authors is a great gift that every boomer grandmother would love to experience.  The new book, "eye of my heart," is a unique Mother's Day treasure for the woman who has molded you and/or your children and now is taking on the mission of becoming a cherished mentor to her grandchildren.... ....wherever they may live.

 Barbara Graham: Eye of My Heart: 27 Writers Reveal the Hidden Pleasures and Perils of Being a Grandmother

 

For more about the life and times of Baby Boomers, please visit this week's Blogging Boomer Carnival #113 hosted by Andrea Stenberg, The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur.

Time to Legalize Drugs?

The drug-fueled murders and mayhem in Mexico bring to mind the Prohibition-era killings in Chicago.

Although the Mexican violence dwarfs the bloodshed of the old bootleggers, both share a common motivation: profits.  These are turf wars, fought between rival gangs trying to increase their share of the market for illegal drugs.

Seventy-five years ago, we sensibly quelled the bootleggers' violence by repealing the prohibition of alcohol.  The only long-term solution to the cartel-related murders in Mexico is to legalize the other illegal drugs we overlooked when we repealed Prohibition in 1933.

Many boomers believe that decriminalizing the possession and use of marijuana would raise billions in taxes and eliminate much of the profits that fuel bloodshed and violence in Mexico and those U.S. states close to Mexican border.  If we taxed the marijuana agribusiness at rates similar to that of tobacco and alcohol, we would raise about $10 billion in taxes per year.

We can try to deal with the Mexican murderers as we first dealt with Al Capone and his minions, or we can apply the lessons we learned from alcohol prohibition and finish dismantling the destructive prohibition experiment. 

Should we begin by decriminalizing marijuana now?  Let us know your thoughts by making a comment below.

Source: Steven B. Duke, professor of law at Yale Law School, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2009

 

Boomer Golden Years

Many boomer workers are putting off retirement because of the economic downturn and the precipitous decline in their 401(k)s and other stock holdings.

In one of its online surveys, CareerBuilder.com found that 60% of workers over the age of 60 plan to delay retirement.  And a majority of those workers say it will take years for them to recoup their lost retirement savings:

11% think they might not ever be able to retire

73% say it will take them up to six years of extra work to recoup their lost savings

24% believe they can make their money back by working an additional year or two

Source: CareerBuilder.com survey of 8,038 U.S. employees between November 12 and December 1, 2008

 

Silver and Gold

Bob Prechter on Silver & Gold
April 2, 2009

By Nico Issac

In case you hadn't noticed: Over the past year of financial turmoil, the "safe haven" premium of precious metals has offered about as much support as a rubber ducky in a tsunami. Despite a string of powerful rallies, silver and gold remain well below their March 2008 peaks.

It goes without saying that the greatest opportunities in precious metals were not had by those who played the "disaster hedge" card; but rather by those who timed the trends as they developed, regardless of the fundamental backdrop.

Blogging Boomer Carnival #112

Blogging carnivals start out by the thousands, but those that can sustain themselves for as many as 50 episodes are much fewer.  And a carnival which has turned out its 100th edition is practically unheard of!

Today, be sure to visit Blogging Boomer Carnival #112 hosted by Barbara Ann Weibel at Hole in the Donut.com

Worklife Two

Against the backdrop of longer lifespan and a premium on brains over brawn, more Baby Boomers are realizing that, in the long run, moving from a high-paying job they don't like to a lower-paying job they enjoy may entail less of a financial hit than they thought.

The key is that the lower-paying job may allow you to work longer than if you'd stayed in the more lucrative career.  And those "extra" years of income allow a portfolio to compound much longer before it's tapped.  Ross Levin, a certified financial planner in Edina, MN says, "You don't need to save as much, and you don't have to live off your portfolio for so long."

A safety net of savings is critical to making a career transition.  In the new way of thinking about retirement, savings are a way to gain flexibility to eventually reshape your career--it's what funds career shifts throughout life.  You can have the freedom to do what you do best and enjoy your encore career.

There are multiple paths toward second and third careers.  Working at nonprofits is now an option.  Civic Ventures, a nonprofit that encourages Baby Boomers to launch new careers, found that 58% of the 50-year-olds it surveyed were looking for a second career that would make their community a better place.  The federal government is recognizing the trend.  Congress recently passed a national service bill that includes, for the first time in decades, opportunities for midcareer shifts, including a one-year Encore Fellowship that will help defray the costs of placing anyone 55 and older in management positions at nonprofits.

Source: BUSINESSWEEK, April 20, 2009

Boomers and Eldercare

In 1946, the year the first Baby Boomer was born, life expectancy was sixty-seven.  So, what's the meaning of the extra twenty or thirty years we have attained since the first boomer's birth?

Life remains mortal and finite. 

With all the recent longevity gains, aren't we just prolonging the human agony?  A look at the life our parents are living in their last years can give us some clues as to what we boomers will be facing in our later years.

Today, two million parents of boomers are residents of the eighteen thousand nursing homes across the U.S.  Two million out of a population of three hundred million may seem like a small number, but the nursing home experience will touch almost all.  If you are a boomer approaching sixty-five, your lifetime chances of spending time in a nursing home are 43 percent.  If not you, it could be your parents. 

As you age, your chances increase.  Only 12 percent of people between sixty-five and seventy-four are in nursing homes, compared to one-third of those between seventy-five and eighty-four.  If you live to eighty-five, your chances are better than one in two.

Shared Thinking

The natural laboratory we call "life" is often much more informative about the way the world works than is the artificial setting of a man-made laboratory.

Some scientists are intrigued by psi, the technical term for psychic abilities, but have openly worried they will lose their credibility if they investigate it.  Strong evidence for psi phenomena such as telepathy is vitally important, for it has the capacity to be the revolutionary catalyst that will redefine our understanding of consciousness.

Twins and Coupled Consciousness

Some of the most compelling evidence for telepathy comes from the study of identical twins.  According to Guy Playfair, author of Twin Telepathy (Vega, 2002), as many as 30 percent of identical twins appear to experience telepathic interconnection.

Some of the earliest research on twin telepathy was done by a twin, Professor Horatio Newman, head of the zoology department at the University of Chicago.  He had what he considered telepathic experiences with his twin brother and published a book called Twins and Super-Twins in 1942.  The section on telepathy discussed identical twins who were mystified by the way they could communicate with each other without any verbal exchange.

Telepathy happens frequently between closely connected twins during crisis.

Blogging Boomer Carnival #111

Come and visit the Blogging Boomer Carnival hosted this week by Laura Lee Carter, the Midlife Crisis Queen.  You will like what you discover about the Baby Boomer Generation here and now.

The Prostate Puzzle for Boomer Men and their Love Partners

Prostate cancer poses some of the most vexing questions in medicine, and one out of every six men in the U.S. will confront them at some point in his life.

Two big studies in the New England Journal of Medicine found that screening for PSA--prostate specific antigen--doesn't save many lives.  Should you keep checking it?

PSA testing revolutionized detection of the disease in the late 1980s.  But PSA screening can flag tumors almost too early, leading to unnecessary surgery or radiation.  Of the 185,000 U.S. men diagnosed with the disease each year, an estimated 85% would likely die of something else long before their cancer caused problems.  Other prostate cancers are aggressive, each year killing some 28,000 men in the U.S. who weren't treated in time.  That makes it the second most deadly cancer in men, after lung cancer.  As of now, it's difficult to tell in a cancer's early stage which patients have which kind of tumor.

Another problem with screening is that PSA levels fluctuate for many reasons, sometimes sending false alarms.  A PSA level is cause for concern if it's higher than usual for the man's age or rising rapidly.  If so, the next step is usually a biopsy.

Most doctors believe that men over 40 with a family history of prostate cancer should have annual PSA testing, along with African-American men, for whom the death rate from prostate cancer is twice as high as for whites.  For others, "you probably don't have to get it tested every year," says Al Barqawi, a urologist at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.  "If there's a change, then do it more often."

Source: Health Journal, The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2009