Jim Rush & Lee Anne Davies

Dr. Jim Rush: As you plan for your retirement, you have to ask yourself how you measure up not only financially, but also in terms of your health. I can help address some of the health issues you'll face as you age during retirement, and the RBC experts will help you deal with the financial considerations. Together, we hope that this information will help you to comprehensively plan for your retirement.

Lee Anne Davies: It's about having a holistic view, and what that means is understanding your physical capital plus your financial capital, and that will be successful planning.

Dr. Jim Rush: Too many Canadians are allowing their physical capabilities to decline at a higher rate than they need to just because of age alone. There's a progressive decline in cardiovascular and muscular fitness with age that amounts to about a 10% decrease per decade of life. This is because your body is changing every year that you age, and, for instance, your heart can pump a lower amount of blood as you age and your muscles are capable of producing less strength.

A sobering fact is that over half of elderly Canadians are physically inactive, and that's a real problem because physical inactivity accelerates the age-dependent declines in cardiovascular and muscular fitness that I just described.

The good news is that you can start now to take control. Most of that has to do with changing your lifestyle to increase the quantity of years and the quality of years that you'll live. Two big factors in that are taking control of your diet and of physical activity.

Increasing physical activity at any age is known to reduce the age-dependant declines in fitness and to help prevent diseases that are normally associated with aging.

Lee Anne Davies: Having a successful retirement isn't just about setting a financial plan in motion. It's about building a plan that's tied to your values, to what your priorities are. When you build that plan, you want to build something that will be enduring, and it's enduring because as things change in your life, as your health changes, your financial plan will evolve to make that fit.

Dr. Jim Rush: Determining how you measure up isn't a simple matter of comparing yourself to others of the same chronological age. There's a huge variability in people's function even if they are the same chronological age. We use a term called functional age to describe the physical, mental and cognitive and sociological functional capabilities of an individual. Physical activity is a lifestyle choice you can make that has a large effect in preserving your functional age.

Lee Anne Davies: People ask us all the time, "How much money do I need? What is that magic number in order to know whether or not I can retire?" What we say to them is, "It's not about the wealth and it's not about your income, but it's understanding the lifestyle that you want to lead in your retirement and making sure that your plan fits with that."

It's that flexibility, it's that dynamic nature of planning, that will help to ensure that you'll be able to preserve your money to fit the lifestyle that you want.

Lee Anne Davies: It's never too late to become more physically or financially prepared for your retirement. The best thing you can do is to motivate yourself to create a comprehensive health and financial plan to bring you through your retirement years. You should have a written plan for your health and finances, you should regularly assess yourself against that plan to make sure that your activities and behaviours match up with your plan, and you have to be flexible enough to modify your health and financial plan in response to potential dynamic changes that occur during your retirement.

Lee Anne Davies: It's that combination of the physical capital plus the financial capital that makes a difference in understanding how you measure up. Go to our website and look at our Research Reports or our Self-Assessment and see how you measure up.