Oakland, CA | East Bay; Which Factors Contribute to a Healthy Retirement?

Hi, I’m Erik Wolfers. I’m the founder and managing member of First & Main Financial. We’ve been helping clients get through retirement since 2001. Today I want to talk a little bit about a longevity; and this specifically pertains to when people are in retirement or their “golden years”.

I go to a continuing education conference every year, and this year I sat in on a talk with a gentleman from the Longevity Institute at Stanford in which he highlighted four factors that have been shown to contribute to a long and healthy life. I wanted to share them with you.

One is connectedness—it’s not good to be isolated when you get older. You want to have a certain number of people you connect with regularly, that you have deep meaningful relationships with. It doesn’t have to be a lot of people—I can’t remember what the magic number was, but it’s less than 10, possibly even less than 5, depending on a person’s personality.

Sleep is critical for everyone, especially when you get older—you need to get adequate sleep so that your body can restore itself; there’s a big wave these days of using breathing devices to help people make sure they get enough oxygen.

Activity when you get older is known as a good for everyone in health and life. You need to be active and it doesn’t necessarily have to be super vigorous activity—but people need to get up and move and move regularly and go for walks, that kind of a thing.

The last thing is sitting. Sitting has been shown to shorten people’s lives if they do it too much.

So again this was research from Stanford and I’m sure there is other great information out there. The Stanford Longevity Institute is good resource. I wanted to share because if you spend your whole life saving money and generating good investment returns, you want to have a good life once you are able to not work anymore.

If you are looking for some financial guidance; whether for a one time financial plan or continuing advice on your investments, we invite you to meet with a First & Main Financial planner for a free consultation. We would be more than happy to sit down with you, assess your situation and review our services to help navigate your financial future.