NewRetirement Retirement News Digest : Relationships

What Are Friends For? A Longer Life

tsaleen — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:38:00 GMT

The New York Times - April 20, 2009

In the quest for better health, many people turn to doctors, self-help books or herbal supplements. But they overlook a powerful weapon that could help them fight illness and depression, speed recovery, slow aging and prolong life: their friends.Researchers are only now starting to pay attention to the importance of friendship and social networks in overall health. A 10-year Australian study found that older people with a large circle of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends. A large 2007 study showed an increase of nearly 60 percent in the risk for obesity among people whose friends gained weight. And last year, Harvard researchers reported that strong social ties could promote brain health as we age.

“In general, the role of friendship in our lives isn’t terribly well appreciated,” said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. “There is just scads of stuff on families and marriage, but very little on friendship. It baffles me. Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.”

In a new book, “The Girls From Ames: A Story of Women and a 40-Year Friendship” (Gotham), Jeffrey Zaslow tells the story of 11 childhood friends who scattered from Iowa to eight different states. Despite the distance, their friendships endured through college and marriage, divorce and other crises, including the death of one of the women in her 20s.

Using scrapbooks, photo albums and the women’s own memories, Mr. Zaslow chronicles how their close friendships have shaped their lives and continue to sustain them. The role of friendship in their health and well-being is evident in almost every chapter.

Two of the friends have recently learned they have *** cancer. Kelly Zwagerman, now a high school teacher who lives in Northfield, Minn., said that when she got her diagnosis in September 2007, her doctor told her to surround herself with loved ones. Instead, she reached out to her childhood friends, even though they lived far away.

“The first people I told were the women from Ames,” she said in an interview. “I e-mailed them. I immediately had e-mails and phone calls and messages of support. It was instant that the love poured in from all of them.”

When she complained that her treatment led to painful sores in her throat, an Ames girl sent a smoothie maker and recipes. Another, who had lost a daughter to leukemia, sent Ms. Zwagerman a hand-knitted hat, knowing her head would be cold without hair; still another sent pajamas made of special fabric to help cope with night sweats.

Ms. Zwagerman said she was often more comfortable discussing her illness with her girlfriends than with her doctor. “We go so far back that these women will talk about anything,” she said.

Ms. Zwagerman says her friends from Ames have been an essential factor in her treatment and recovery, and research bears her out. In 2006, a study of nearly 3,000 nurses with *** cancer found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends. And notably, proximity and the amount of contact with a friend wasn’t associated with survival. Just having friends was protective.

Bella DePaulo, a visiting psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose work focuses on single people and friendships, notes that in many studies, friendship has an even greater effect on health than a spouse or family member. In the study of nurses with *** cancer, having a spouse wasn’t associated with survival.

While many friendship studies focus on the intense relationships of women, some research shows that men can benefit, too. In a six-year study of 736 middle-age Swedish men, attachment to a single person didn’t appear to affect the risk of heart attack and fatal coronary heart disease, but having friendships did. Only smoking was as important a risk factor as lack of social support.

Exactly why friendship has such a big effect isn’t entirely clear. While friends can run errands and pick up medicine for a sick person, the benefits go well beyond physical assistance; indeed, proximity does not seem to be a factor.

It may be that people with strong social ties also have better access to health services and care. Beyond that, however, friendship clearly has a profound psychological effect. People with strong friendships are less likely than others to get colds, perhaps because they have lower stress levels.

Last year, researchers studied 34 students at the University of Virginia, taking them to the base of a steep hill and fitting them with a weighted backpack. They were then asked to estimate the steepness of the hill. Some participants stood next to friends during the exercise, while others were alone.

The students who stood with friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.

“People with stronger friendship networks feel like there is someone they can turn to,” said Karen A. Roberto, director of the center for gerontology at Virginia Tech. “Friendship is an undervalued resource. The consistent message of these studies is that friends make your life better.”

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Plan Mentally for Retirement Not Just Financially

tsaleen — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 05:12:00 GMT

Chron Business News - March 9, 2009

Many people entering retirement envision a life of fun and relaxation, but the opposite can be true. Without the social contacts that come from reporting to an office everyday, some retirees feel isolated. Others feel depression from an emptiness that comes with sudden idle time.

Psychologist Nancy Schlossberg's latest of nine books, "Revitalizing Retirement: Reshaping Your Identity, Relationships, and Purpose" says you should spend as much time preparing your psychological portfolio as you do your financial one. In today's recession, which is leaving millions of workers suddenly jobless, her tips also can help unemployed workers develop a plan for moving on.

Schlossberg is professor emerita of the College of Education at the University of Maryland and co-president of TransitionWorks, a consulting company that focuses on helping people adjust to life changes in Adelphia, Md.

Q: Your book discusses the need to develop a psychological portfolio for retirement, what exactly does that mean and why is it important?

A: For many workers, the psychological adjustment to retirement is as difficult as the financial one. I make the case that people go to a financial adviser and consult often yearly, sometimes more frequently. They go to a physician to get a checkup. But no one is checking up on their psychological portfolio because they didn't really have one. It's important, not just for retirement, but for every major change in life — career changes, marriage, divorce. Those things change the way you define yourself, your relationships and often change your sense of purpose.

The more people I interviewed, the more I began to realize three common issues — identity, relationships and purpose — arise when people retire. These issues make up the psychological portfolio that I refer to and should be honestly assessed and managed if one is to be happy.

Q: For many people psychological issues aren't as concrete as financial decisions. Can you explain how to go about assessing these areas and managing them?

A: The major thing people realize after they retire is that their identity has been compromised. While working, they knew who they were — a roofer, a bricklayer, a college professor, an accountant. They had a tag, an identity. People don't think about that. They don't realize that after retirement, the issue of identity is critical.

Finding interests that help you focus on who you are is the key. The book illustrates points with real life examples including a police officer who couldn't figure out who he was after retirement. He was divorced and directionless until he agreed to work in a temporary job helping a family member manage a hotel. The job gave him a new identity and new working relationships. He remarried and 10 years later is still doing the job.

Q: How about relationships and finding a new purpose in retirement. Why are these important issues?

A: Many people feel an intense vacuum after leaving the workplace because their social network of co-workers is gone. They need to find a substitute for work colleagues. Many people find a part-time job that gives them interaction with others. Some find fulfillment in volunteering with a community organization or becoming involved with a church group. They must be sure to find some community of people.

It's also likely that they'll have to renegotiate the relationship with their spouse or life partner. Many men and women find it very trying when they first retire because they're not ready to be with one another 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Finding a new purpose is integral to the happiness of many retirees. Many people must feel as if they matter and often lose that sense when they no longer work every day. They must place themselves in situations in which they feel appreciated and depended upon. People need to look in their communities for places where they feel they matter. Giving back is one of the best ways to do this — working at a soup kitchen or in some other capacity in which they're helping others.

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How to Financially Cope With Being Suddenly Single

tsaleen — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:38:00 GMT

US News & World Report - June 12, 2008

Widowhood poses special challenges in retirement.

When Elaine Williams became a widow four years ago at age 47, she took on extra data-entry work to help make up for the loss of her husband's income. She also learned how to make myriad financial decisions, including those related to their three sons, now ages 15, 22, and 23, without his input. "Suddenly, everything is on you," says Williams, who runs a lawn maintenance company in Jewett, N.Y.

Like Williams, widows and widowers often face financial challenges, including sharp drops in income and managing money on their own for the first time. Women are particularly vulnerable to money problems. More than 4 in 10 women 65 and over are widows. And because they have often earned less than their husbands, they may experience a larger income decrease in widowhood. But financial advisers say that smart advance planning can go a long way toward easing many of those hardships. Here are six ways to relieve the financial pressures of widowhood:

Replace lost income. Pension, Social Security, and salary losses can be offset with life insurance proceeds or other sources of money, says Sri Reddy, head of retirement income strategies for ing U.S. Wealth Management. He suggests taking out insurance worth between 10 and 20 times the income that needs to be replaced to make sure the insurance payout after the policyholder's death can generate enough income. A person earning $100,000 a year, for example, would need at least a $1 million policy, an amount that would be unlikely to fully replace the lost income. Of course, taking out insurance earlier in life tends to be cheaper; Reddy estimates that the average industrywide premium on a 20-year, $1 million term life policy on a healthy 30-year-old is around $500 a year.

Some pension plans allow employees to opt for lower payouts while they are living in exchange for higher survivor's benefits after death, which leaves more for the surviving spouse. Mary McGrath, executive vice president at Cozad Asset Management, a financial planning firm in Champaign, Ill., says even couples with other assets should consider selecting an option that allows benefit payments to the surviving spouse after death, because suddenly losing all income adds unnecessary stress to the grieving process. "It's too upsetting to the survivor to have all of the income cease when you die," she says.

My Child’s Divorce Is My Pain

jberman — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 02:51:00 GMT

The New York Times, September 2nd, 2007

The breakup of the marriage brought Ina Chadwick heartache, guilt and financial hardship. The divorce, she said, tore away from her everything in her “Cinderella dream.”

But the divorce she so ruefully speaks about was her daughter’s, not her own.

“You live through your child’s divorce,” said Ms. Chadwick, 60, a writer who is still dealing with the fallout from the collapse of her middle daughter’s marriage four years ago.

Marsha Temlock, a retired family counselor in Westport, Conn., said her initial reaction to the divorce announcement of one of her two sons five years ago was, “How could you divorce this wonderful girl?” For months she fielded calls from the son and the daughter-in-law like a “switchboard operator,” she said, letting their divorce monopolize her life.

Ms. Temlock eventually let go, and even wrote a book for parents going through their own children’s divorce. But for a long time, she said, “I was bereft.”

As the ties between parents and adult children have grown closer over the last few decades, more parents find themselves navigating the rocky shoals of divorce, or even the breakup of long-term relationships, right along with their children, some family and marriage experts say.

Parents today are not only more involved in their adult children’s lives but they are also living longer and more active lives, said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at John Hopkins University who was the co-writer of a book on American grandparents. This means, he said, that “it’s much more common for adult children to have their parents still living when they divorce.”

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Study: Seniors having more sex than you think

jberman — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 04:54:00 GMT

CNN, August 24th, 2007

Many older Americans routinely engage in vaginal intercourse, oral sex and masturbation, a landmark study into a long-taboo subject reported Wednesday.

"From a societal perspective, I would say that old people are young people later in life," said Dr. Stacy Tesler Lindau, lead author of the federally funded study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Sexual activity reported among the 3,005 men and women who participated in the survey did decrease with age, particularly among the oldest participants -- from 73 percent among those 57 to 64 years of age to 53 percent among those 65 to 74 years of age to 26 percent among those 75 to 85 years of age.

Discussion of the sex habits of American seniors has received little attention, even from scientists.

"Hopefully, this opens the door for conversation that might counter stereotypes," Lindau told reporters in a conference call. "If we regard older people as asexual, particularly as physicians, we really miss an opportunity to do important counseling and interventions for people who may benefit from them."

Among the survey's many discoveries was that about half of those 57 to 75 years of age who remained sexually active reported engaging in oral sex.

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Emptying Nest Eggs, Not the Nests

jberman — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 01:23:00 GMT

The New York Times, July 14th, 2007

Their son, Michael, 23, just moved back home and is looking for a job. Their daughter, Alison, 20, will start graduate school at Columbia University next month, and they are paying her rent.

In contrast to previous generations, when young people generally took control of their finances — and their lives — after graduating from college, more parents are supporting their offspring well into adulthood.

In part, it is a matter of economic necessity. College graduates face enormous loan debt. Their entry-level salaries do not come close to covering high housing costs in many parts of the country. And their parents, fearing the worst, agree to pitch in. Then there is the emotional attachment.

“It’s a gift we can give them now,” said Mrs. Riccardi of Hillsdale, N.J. “If we can bite the bullet now, it will help them later.”

This gift is not a couple of $20 bills tucked into a holiday or birthday card. It is more like an allowance that extends past adolescence, often into the 30s. It pays for housing, bills and other expenses. In fact, research shows that financial strings to the parents’ wallets are never really severed.