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Senior Retirement in New Jersey

New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides senior care, home care & live-in care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Americans are reversing what had been a nearly century-long decline in the participation of older people in the workforce.

For both workers and employers, the rising number of older workers is the result of choice and circumstance.

Workers, faced with shrinking medical and dental benefits and less generous retirement plans, find they don’t have the financial resources to support themselves in retirement, so a lot more of them are returning to work.

Companies, faced with a labor gap that will rise to 4.8 million workers within 10 years and 20 million within 20 years, are seeing older workers in a new light. Older workers represent a pool of talent companies need.

Conventional wisdom used to be that employees over 50 cost companies more in terms of medical problems and missed workdays. But that may not be the case, as studies show that costs associated with older workers are about the same as those of younger workers.

Workers over 50 make up for additional health costs by being more reliable and often more productive than younger workers. An AARP survey of human resource professionals showed that 77% said that older workers have a higher level of commitment than younger workers, and 68% said it cost less or the same to train older workers compared to younger workers.

Older workers also tend to have fewer or no dependent-related health- or child-care costs, and they require lower training and recruitment costs, according to Gail Jern, human resources manager for Westaff.

New Jersey Planning for Live in Care

New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

 “According to some sources, 60% of us will need long term care sometime during our lives. It is important for all of us to prepare for that day when we will need to help loved ones with elder care or we will need elder care for ourselves.”

“It is simply a fact of life to prepare financially for unexpected disasters by covering our homes, automobiles and health with insurance policies and to provide funding for our retirement. But no other life event can be as devastating to our lifestyle, finances and security as needing long term care. It drastically alters or completely eliminates the three principal retirement dreams of elderly Americans, which are:

1. Remaining independent in the home without intervention from others
2. Maintaining good health and receiving adequate health care
3. Having enough money for everyday needs and not outliving assets and income

Yet, it is our experience that the majority of the American public does not plan for the devastating crisis of needing eldercare. This lack of planning also has an adverse effect on the older person’s family, with sacrifices made in time, money, family lifestyles and even affecting the family’s or caregiver’s medical and emotional health.” National Care Planning Council “The 4 Steps of Long Term Care Planning”.… read the entire article by going to the link below

Please go to the following URL for the entire article and previous articles: Either click on the link   http://www.planforcare.org or copy and paste the following into your browser:  http://www.planforcare.org

New Jersey Elder Care Planning

New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

The Process of Long Term Care Planning by Thomas Day

The Seven Steps of the Planning Process

Understanding the natural progression of long-term care and the resources available to help can be an invaluable asset to a family or spouse who are currently providing care or someday in the future, may eventually have to provide help for a loved one. We call this process long term care planning. It involves:

Understanding the Process of Planning

Understanding Care Settings

Understanding Government Long-Term Care Programs

Knowing Who to Contact for Help

Creating Sources of Funding to Pay for Services

Using Strategies to Preserve Assets

Creating a Long Term Care Plan

New Jersey Elder Wealth Transition

New Jersey’s Expert Home Care for Elders and Seniors provides care for your aging loved ones since 1984. Please call us when your loved one needs help – 800-848-2336.

Five Steps to a Successful Transition of Family Wealth and Values

Roy Williams and Vic Preisser. Preparing Heirs: Five Steps to a Successful Transition of Family Wealth and Values. Robert D. Reed Publishers, San Francisco, CA. 2003.

If you have worked hard to accumulate wealth, you probably want to make sure your heirs don’t lose control of it. Preparing Heirs gives families the tools to successfully transfer wealth from one generation to the next.

The authors, both of whom are family coaches with many years of experience counseling wealthy families, interviewed thousands of families and discovered that 70 percent of wealth transfers fail. Preparing Heirs explains the techniques that worked for the 30 percent of families that successfully “transitioned” wealth.

According to the authors, the key to a successful transition of wealth is family involvement. “The most important single issue that undermines successful transfers of wealth is the breakdown of trust and communications within the family unit,” they write. Using handy checklists, Preparing Heirs discusses how to assess a wealth transition plan, how to fix deficiencies in the plan, how to prepare heirs, and how heirs can prepare themselves.

For mid-size and large estates, this book offers valuable advice on successfully transferring wealth to the next generation and beyond.

5 Questions to Ask Your Financial Planner

1. How have my investments actually performed? It’s scary to watch the Dow drop by more than 700 points in one day. But how does that compare with your own investments? “To some extent, everyone is seeing market losses right now,” says John Gannon, senior vice president of investor education for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). “But it’s really an important time to open your account statements and take a look at them and benchmark your performance.”

Ask your financial adviser to compare the performance of your investments to relevant indexes or to other funds with similar investing strategies — focusing on the past few months and years, not the day-to-day gyrations.

Also ask about the performance of your overall portfolio, focusing on the past one, three and five years. “I really feel that no financial-planning client or investment advisory client should be doing as badly as the markets; that is, if the broad market is down 25%, then they should be down no more than 20% and probably less,” says Bob Veres, publisher of Inside Information, a well-respected newsletter for financial planners.

2. How do my investments match my time frame and goals? One of the biggest benefits of working with a financial planner is that he or she should pick investments within the context of your overall financial plan — dividing your savings into several sections and selecting the investments for each based on your time frame and goals.

And ask about the adviser’s strategy for meeting your medium-term goals.

3. What adjustments are you making because of this market? “A good adviser will have put a plan in place that expects horrible times in the markets,” says Daniel Moisand, a certified financial planner in Melbourne, Fla., and chairman of the Certified Financial Planner Board’s disciplinary and ethics commission.

The adviser shouldn’t make rash decisions during a market downturn, especially if you’ve been well-diversified and your investments match your time frame and goals. “Any adviser who says you should sell everything during the capitulation period of a bear market is not somebody I would want to work with,” Veres says.

4. How much am I paying for guarantees? Some “advisers” may offer to eliminate future worries by selling a product promising big guarantees. “I would be highly skeptical of any product pitches that purport to have severed the relationship between risk and reward,” says Moisand.

5. How do you plan to keep me updated and answer questions? You can learn a lot about your financial planner during this crisis — not just how he or she manages your investments, but how well the adviser explains the situation and what action you should take, answers your questions and makes you feel more comfortable. “This is probably the time when you need your financial professional more than at any other time,” says Gannon.

And your adviser should be giving you the attention you deserve now.

If you haven’t been satisfied with your planner’s performance, see In Search of Good Advice for help finding a new one.

http://kiplinger.com/columns/ask/archive/2008/q1027.htm