Being healthy and investing strategically to position yourself for a good retirement is part of an integrated approach of maximizing your wealth.In addition it ensures financial sustainability and a better life without compromising your standard of living and outliving your nest egg. Good health has the potential to:
- Reduce healthcare cost thereby maximizing your investment potential at a younger age
- Good health and longevity could ensure postponing tapping into retirement funds and social security benefits ensuring best returns for investments
- Increased savings potential as there is increased opportunity to work
- A healthy mind contributes and improves the efficiency to utilize good information
- An opportunity of passing life lessons to kids and grand kids
Whilst a healthy life has enormous benefits, a mix of good health, long life and poor investing habit could be detrimental and counterproductive.A long and healthy life means the potential to outlive your savings and retirement nest egg with a risk of reduced standard of living if significant portion of your financial resources are not invested in a well-diversified portfolio.
In a recent survey by BlackRock, people are worried about outliving their retirement savings. Rob Kapita, BlackRock president concluded that, “People are living longer than ever before, dramatically altering the financial challenges in retirement.
In spite of this worry, still, there are significant health risk and cost to those that are taking less heed to improving their health outcomes.
Heart diseases, diabetes mellitus and some types of cancer continue to be the leading cause of death and high cost to many families across America and other parts of the world as well.Most of the causes emanate from poor lifestyle choices such as poor eating habits, lack of exercise, smoking and poor health management systems.
The American heart association reports that:
- Almost 4 percent of U.S. adults — nearly one in 25 — will have a stroke. This translates into an additional 3.4 million people with stroke in 2030.
- Costs to treat stroke may increase from $71.55 billion in 2010 to $183.13 billion.
- Annual costs due to lost productivity could rise from $33.65 billion to $56.54 billion.
- Americans , age 45-64 years old, are expected to have the highest risk in stroke at 5.1 percent.
A healthy lifestyle, longevity and poor investing habit is a bad mix.
Not everyone can boast of a good investment in a high demand specialized degree but that should not be the end.An entrepreneurship undertaking that consistently executes unique services and products to well funded and paying customers could also be a good start or a springboard for maximizing investments.
For millions who happen to be fortunate to potentially benefit from the American financial and social security system, the below creed is worth noting.
- Invest in a high demand specialized degree
- Be wary of the student loan
- Start your career with a firm that invests in your skills and expertise
- Understand payroll taxes and benefit deduction
- Understand the allowable IRS 401K yearly deduction
- Save significant portion of your earned income towards a down payment for your house in the best of locations
- Understand credit cards and use it to your advantage
- Maximize yearly Roth IRA in an indexed fund or ETF with low expense ratio
We all fall short consistently for lack of discipline and education to maintain good health and ensure better investing habits.Whilst it is difficult,it is possible to commit and effect change for a better future for ourselves and bring less ache to our loved ones and society.