My Top Priority in Retirement

Sunday is my favorite day of the week - I love putting my feet up on the ottoman and digging into the big local Sunday paper. Yesterday, an article in the editorial section caught my eye. It was written by Jennie Chin Hansen, CEO of the American Geriatrics Society. According to Hansen, our first priority, as seniors seeking an active retirement, should be taking care of our health. Now, her advice seemed very centered within Standard American Medicine, and most of her suggestions involved soliciting advice from healthcare professionals, pharmacists, and even geriatrics specialists. Too, I got the impression that she assumes we’re all taking a boat load of medicines. I did, though, find myself in agreement with her main premise. 

Hansen’s article points out that there are 77 million baby boomers out there, over half of them sedentary or overweight or both. I have to admit to the overweight part... sigh... though I’m not sedentary. What this means, though, is that many of us are at increased risk of diabetes, heart trouble and a lot of other diseases that we think of as characteristic of old age. And it’s hard to have an active retirement, let alone to live well, if you’re chronically ill. Not impossible, but much harder. Plus, even with Medicare and good insurance, medical care and prescription drugs can suck up a huge amount of your savings. Buh bye vacation!

Fortunately, according to Hansen, there is a lot we can do to improve our health. She suggests seeing your doctor every year for a checkup, and helpfully points out that Medicare now provides an annual “wellness visit.” She notes that you need to be sure that all those medicines you’re surely taking don’t cause harmful interactions with one another or with your over-the-counter medicines and vitamin supplements. And then there's more advice to consult with your various medical specialists to design a beneficial healthcare, diet, and exercise program for you. Really? Ms. Hansen seems to be living in a different universe from mine. I can’t imagine the harried, rushed doctors I’ve seen most recently taking the time to do all of that in any kind of comprehensive way.

But one of Hansen’s suggestions is brilliant, and though I think we’ve all heard it before, it bears repeating. She wants each of us to become an active participant in our own health care. I totally agree with that. We can no longer depend blindly on our doctors and the pharmaceutical industry to keep us in good health. The way things are going in this country, I’m not confident those of us who retire on a modest income can depend on even mediocre health care being reliably available to us in coming years.

I feel like the best thing I can do for myself is to take responsibility for my health into my own hands. Statistics suggest that at some point I’ll have to deal with a serious illness. But before then, there is a great deal I can learn to do for myself to maintain my health and to correct relatively minor problems, including those things that can lead to serious illness down the road. I don’t want to be one of those oldsters who goes to the doctor every week, takes a zillion pills, and has a mind closed to any health advice not coming from their doctors. I know people like that and they are really pathetic.

In fact, I have a close relative by marriage who exemplifies this attitude. A few years ago she was employed, walking a lot, happy and active. Then she was laid off, and seems to have taken up going to the doctor as a new hobby. First they gave her antidepressants because she was a little unhappy about losing her job. Then, because her cholesterol was a bit high, she was put on a statin drug. Predictably, her capacity to exercise declined and her blood sugar levels rose (both documented side effects of statins), so she stopped walking as much and was put on another prescription for her pre-diabetic condition. Over the last few years, she has continued to see the doctors more and more often, has been given more and more prescription drugs, and has seen her health and level of well-being continue to decline. She remains completely closed to suggestions about lifestyle changes - diet, exercise, natural remedies - and although she’d probably listen to her doctors, they just seem to give her more appointments and more prescriptions.

Personally, I have found it quite valuable to search and use the enormous amount of healthcare information available for free these days via the internet. The problem is that some of it is excellent, and some of it is ridiculously bad, and it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. I think I’ve gotten a lot better at sorting the wheat from the chaff, but still there is a lot of good but conflicting information on the web. This is particularly true when it comes to identifying an optimal diet. And that's too bad, because improving our diet may be one of the most important things we can do to improve and maintain our health. Different sources insist on low carbohydrate, or no gluten, or low fat, or no animal-sourced foods, each recommended by a different medical doctor, each doctor with good credentials, and all accompanied by lots of glowing testimonials from real people who got great results.

This lack of uniformity in recommendations causes “information paralysis” in many people, so that they finally give up and go on doing what they’ve always done, which usually is to eat a poor-quality (but tasty) diet and to not exercise any more than they have to. I don’t think all the answers are in yet in the so-called “diet wars,” but if you look at all the recommendations, you find some common threads:

• Eat plenty of fresh vegetables, both raw and cooked. Vegetables, especially the green or highly-colored and low-starch ones, have the highest ratio of micronutrients to calories and are an important part of virtually every expert's diet recommendations.
• Include fresh fruit in your diet, too, but not too much. If you have weight problems or are diabetic, you may do better concentrating on lower-sugar fruits like berries and melons. Fruit should be eaten whole, as grown, and not as juice.
• Eliminate as much processed food as possible. Eat foods as they are grown, in natural, minimally processed form. Sugar, refined grains, and packaged and chemical-laden foods should be avoided.
• Get some daily exercise, but don’t overdo. Include some aerobic exercise that gets you breathing deeply, such as brisk walking. Also do some resistance exercise and stretching. Resistance exercise, such as lifting weights, helps you retain your muscle, which often atrophies in older, inactive people. Stretching, such as yoga, maintains flexibility and helps avoid injuries. Most of important of all, though, is to do these at your own level and to not over-exercise. Trying to walk long distances or jog when you are not ready, lifting weights that are too heavy, or forcing a stretch, all may cause injury and actually delay your progress in the long run. 

The jury still seems to be out as to the proportions of fat, carbohydrate and protein I should be eating. I need to continue to research and do some trial-and-error self-experimentation to figure that part out. But I think these are recommendations I can rely on and that will continue to support my health as I age.

A Confession: I’ve Been Wasting Food

This morning I threw away two chicken legs, uncooked. Earlier this week, I removed them from the freezer and put them in the fridge to thaw. Then I put away some groceries in front of the chicken... and they got lost. I forgot about them until too late.

I felt bad about tossing the chicken, but it smelled bad. It was definitely spoiled, and who wants to risk food poisoning? Fortunately, I bought the chicken legs in bulk for 79¢ a pound, so the loss was small. Still, every time I sort out the refrigerator I throw out wilted vegetables and past-prime or even moldy leftovers. The individual cost of these items is usually small... but they add up.

I wonder how much I would be cutting from my food budget if I could eliminate most of this waste? Maybe 25%, according to the experts, because it turns out that in the US, consumers waste 25% of the food we buy. 

I think the main reasons I personally end up throwing out food are these:

• I buy too much of something and am unable to use it all before it spoils. I do this a lot with fruit and vegetables.
• I cook too much, and even though I always save leftovers, they don’t always get used.
• Things get pushed to the back of the refrigerator, effectively disappearing until it’s too late. This is what happened with my chicken legs.
• I don’t keep track of what needs to be used soon, so that I can plan to use it up before it expires. I used to go through my refrigerator once or twice a week and make a list of what needed to be used right away. 
• I haven’t been planning out lunches and dinners that incorporate my soon-to-expire items. I used to make that “use soon” list just before making a weekly menu plan and shopping list. 
• I know something needs to be used, but I impulsively choose to eat something else that I like better at the moment, or to pick up a pizza, hamburger, or other quick meal instead. 

What I see is that I need to recover some of the organization and planning skills that I used when my kids were home and I was planning and cooking daily meals. In the more relaxed environment of empty-nesthood and retirement I’ve slacked off a lot. I’ve stopped planning my lunch and dinner menus, and I almost never take a really careful look at what’s on hand before planning menus or heading out for groceries.

More discipline is called for in the case of impulsive fast food meals, of course. But discipline, planning and organization are at the heart of all these new and better ways of doing things to limit food waste.

Food wastage is a big issue not just in our personal budgets, but in environmental responsibility as well. Because food production consumes a significant amount of the energy used nationally, as well as most of the fresh water used in the US, cutting back on personal food waste lessens our energy and water use footprints and cuts greenhouse gas emissions. 

I really want to do better at this. I hate throwing food out. My raised-during-the-Great Depression mom definitely inculcated frugality concepts in me. But more importantly, cutting my food waste is just a good thing to do for myself as well as the environment.

"Stealth Frugality": How I Learned the Concepts

Deciding to live well, on a small retiree's budget, meant dredging up some of the frugality skills I learned years ago. Back then, as a stay-at-home mom and wife of a pathologically stingy husband, I needed to learn to do a lot with a little.

Some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s, before I discovered The Tightwad Gazette and Amy Dacyzysn (legendary now in frugality circles), I read a book called Champagne Living on a Beer Budget by Mike and Marilyn Ferguson. Dacyzysn's writing is better known, but I'm glad I discovered the Fergusons first. Their approach to frugality was quite different from that of Dacyzysn, very up-beat and creative.


More recently, I bought a used paperback copy of Champagne Living but did not find it as compelling as I did all those years ago. Back then it was cutting edge stuff... now, it's more mainstream, things we've all heard before. However, it models what I think of as "Stealth frugality," the best kind to use if you want to live a good life in retirement without being annoying or pathetic.

Too often, when I read articles and blogs about frugality, it sounds so depressing. You spend less, but your result... the life you create... is not particularly lovely or inspiring. Savings become your primary focus, and honestly that's not any more appealing than when money and wealth are your focus. They seem like just two sides of the same coin to me.

Stealth Frugality, on the other hand, focuses primarily on having the good things of life, the beautiful and desirable things that make your life a wonderful place to be, with the things that make you feel good. This is easy when you have a lot of money. But it's also possible on that beer budget, too. Living well on a shoestring really is an art, and a very personal one.

Living well on little, but not sinking into the grinding, depressing stinginess that the word "tightwad" brings to mind, definitely requires a new way of thinking. Here are a few of the things I remember learning from Champagne Living on a Beer Budget. These remain the most important elements of a Stealth Frugality skill set:

• Prioritization - If you don't have all the money in the world, you have to decide which things are the most important to you. This is highly individual. I pay for high speed internet, but not for cable TV, because I just don't like watching TV that much. I like expensive clothes , but get my underwear on sale at K-Mart. We decide what's important... to us, not to other people... and then spend the money we have accordingly.
• Good taste - You need to become familiar with what quality looks and feels like, or you will find it hard to identify bargains that are of good quality. For example, Marshall's and TJ Maxx have hundreds of handbags, but only a small fraction are of good quality. The good bags often look very like the junkier ones. If you know how to look for quality and good brands, though, you can buy a super-nice leather bag that will look good for years and years, compared to a cheaper one that will look shabby by next year. Even though the good bag may cost two or three times the lower-quality one, your cost-per-use will be far less with the good bag. You can easily learn to tell the difference in quality in everything you buy by reading top-of-the-line fashion and shelter magazines and by browsing at upper-end retail stores.
• Research skills - Knowing how to get information is still very important when it comes to frugality, but nowadays we mostly use the internet. I've learned so much about how to have and do things for less from websites, blogs, and search engines. For instance, I've found that what drives up the cost of foodie-type cooking is mostly a lot of unusual, difficult-to-find, and expensive ingredients. But by searching the internet for simpler recipes that use good-quality but commonly-available ingredients, I can prepare dishes that cost less, taste delicious, and as a bonus are often of historical interest. Likewise, it's nice to know how to compare the plus-shipping costs of things you buy online. And the internet is full of free, detailed how-to's for everything from plumbing repairs to building furniture.
• Delayed gratification - Failure to acquire this "skill" is a common downfall of would-be frugalists. One thing I distinctly remember from Champagne Living on a Beer Budget is the dictum to never, ever buy something because you need it right now. Instead, try to find a work-around - borrow, rent, find an alternative. Then buy only when you find a bargain. Buying in need usually means paying full price. Waiting to buy during an end-of-season clearance or off-season sale often allows you to buy top quality for much less. But this requires planning ahead and delayed gratification.
• Organization and record keeping - You can find lots of lists of what is on sale when, and plan your purchases accordingly. Buy new lawn furniture in the fall, at an end-of-summer clearance, rather than waiting for spring and paying full price. This requires you to plan ahead, anticipate your future needs, and keep lists and calendars. Likewise, you should be keeping lists of gifts you'll need to give, so you can pick up nice things in advance and at a good price. This saves you money, and also allows you to give nicer gifts than you would have otherwise.
• Thinking outside the box - Creativity is maybe the most important skill you'll need to be really successful at stealth frugality. Once you know what you like, what will make you feel good, creativity and smarts are what will help you figure out how to achieve it, or an acceptable feel-good equivalent that is within your budget. Personally, I'm not very creative, but I borrow other people's creativity, usually found in magazine or newspaper articles or on the internet. I love seeing how people can take a very expensive decorating or fashion look and recreate it on a shoestring. Being good at finding, combining, and/or adapting other people's good ideas is a valid form of creativity.

Time Management - Needed in Retirement More than Ever

More than ever, as we age, we need to take seriously how we use our time. A lot of people just throw out their agendas and planners when they retire. I am starting to think that I may need mine more than ever! I just find it so easy to slide through a day unstructured by job or appointments. Too often I find myself at the end of the day having accomplished very little that will have any positive effect on my tomorrows.

This morning, a quote caught my attention:

“Much of the trajectory of our lives is made up of seemingly small, daily decisions.” ~~ Doug Sherman in More than Ordinary.

Thinking about this, I realized that it’s not yet too late. I can still change the course of my life via these kinds of small, daily decisions. It’s true - they do seem small and insignificant on a day-by-day basis. And as such, I think I tend to ignore them. Whether or not I go for that morning walk, write entries in my journal and gratitude pages, get my household and garden maintenance chores done, reach out to friends and family - none of these seem very crucial to any given day. Almost always there are much more urgent or desirable things I need to do, or want to do - things like preparing lesson plans and handouts for teaching; paying bills; reading the newspaper, blogs, or a good book; attending meetings. Those little, daily things, they can always be done tomorrow if I don’t have the time or inclination today, can’t they?

But as Sherman suggests, little decisions to slack off on the small things we need to do, in order to create the kind of life we deeply desire, are actually decisions in themselves. They are decisions to NOT go after my longer range goals in favor of short-term ones that I actually care a lot less about.

This morning's meditation has given me a lot to think about regarding how I conduct my life. There are quite a few things I still want to do, ways I still want to improve my life and how I live. I've already started forming some excellent new habits. But I see that creating a more focused approach to planning my time each day is now in order.

Honor Thy Parents? Not So Much for Some

On Saturday, my students surprised me with a lovely party. It turns out that May 15 is Teacher's Day in Mexico, and Mother's Day was Sunday, and so they wanted to honor me on both counts. To say I was very touched would be an understatement. Here are the beautiful flowers I was given... a dozen fragrant, deep pink roses and a pretty orchid plant. There were other gifts, lots of delicious tamales and other good food, and impromptu speeches about how thankful they've been for my help, my patience, and my friendship. They even played mariachi music!

They are such a lovely group of people, and I really did feel deeply honored. None of these people are at all wealthy, but the depth of their generosity always surprises me. I've noticed after years of volunteer tutoring and teaching adult English learners, people from all different cultures, people without a lot of money, that compared to most other cultures we Americans have become increasingly neglectful, if not disrespectful, of our adult parents.

Personally, I am acquainted with more than a few women who I know were great mothers, who spent years making sacrifices for their children. Women who typically are forgotten by their children on Mother's Day, birthdays, holidays.  I know there are lots of good mothers who on Mother's Day were not honored in any way. Usually they don't talk readily about this situation. They put on a brave face, make excuses for their children, and don't complain. Many are deeply ashamed and feel they have failed as parents. They don't realize how common a situation this has become... there are many others in the same boat, but practically nobody's talking about it.

Today's American society just does not put the emphasis on family ties and honoring of parents that existed in the past, and still does in most other cultures. I cannot imagine something like this happening among any of the foreign-born students I've worked with. They would find such behavior abhorrent. True, there are still countless families in the U.S. in which adult children appreciate and honor their mothers and fathers. But from what I have seen, there is also a growing trend towards blatant ingratitude and neglect. And it seems like the better off the children are financially, the more likely this is to be the case.

As one of my friends put it when we were talking about her rather flagrantly neglectful kids, "Out of sight, out of mind." These same children, though, are always ready to schedule visits to their parents' beautiful home, located in a vacation destination area, and even to drop off the grand kids to spend a week  with their grandparents. I think maybe we have somehow managed to raise a lot of really spoiled offspring.

Personally, I had a nice Mother's Day. I was taken for a delicious brunch by my daughter, son-in-law, and grand kids. To say I felt totally honored would be pushing things, though, since my daughter says that she isn't creative about gifts and will need me to give her precise instructions about what gift I would like. I feel really awkward about this sort of thing. I don't know what would be an appropriate price range, for one thing. A card, gift certificate or a bunch of flowers or a plant would have been easier. Now it will feel like I'm asking for something. But compared to what I keep seeing among other women my age, I feel guilty grumbling at all.

For so many older parents, the situation really is heartbreaking, especially those who are alone, divorced or widowed. So if you have friends, or even just acquaintances, who you suspect may be ignored on important days like Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthdays, and other holidays - celebrate with them! It won't be the same as coming from their children, of course. But as little as a call, a card, a visit, or even a quick e-mail could help make their day. If some of our adult children have forgotten how to honor their aging parents, well then... I think we should just do it for one other.