How living longer can hurt your retirement planning

Retirement

My comments on a recent article in the Toronto Star  “How living longer can hurt your retirement planning” by Moshe A. Milevsky & Alexandra Macqueen

This is another comprehensible article for all retirees to consider.

Now we are faced with the fact that we could live longer for varied reasons and the question is, how do we cope with that?

It might seem a simplistic answer but this is the reason life annuities were designed.They take out that risk of outliving your money and put the risk on the shoulders of the insurance company. As you don’t intend to shovel snow when you are older but rely on someone else, so you hire the insurance company to send you monthly cheques.

The talk of mortality tables and longevity risk means little to each person who is concerned with their own situation. And all these theoretical discussions never mention the physical and/or mental health of health of the annuitants. All the planning goes out the window when somebody becomes ill.