The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide

In this year of change, the changes keep coming

I should have been more prepared. The Australians warned us. The wildfires they experienced during their summer fire season were the worst in history.

But here I am. Not only staying home due to covid-19, but now, I have to stay inside due to smoky air from wildfires throughout the West Coast.

Maybe the air will clear this week. Maybe not. My daughter in California has been dealing with heavy smoke in the air since Aug. 20. The fires there won’t be out until it rains, probably in October.

See my article for tips on how to deal with smoky air.

Others are dealing with change, too:

Experiencing a funeral in the era of the coronavirus

This week Meryl Baer of Beach Boomer Bulletin returned to her hometown of more than 30 years for the funeral of a good friend. Funerals are different in a pandemic, but mourning doesn’t change. Baer reminisces about her friend and her hometown family.

Learning something new due to covid-19

Tom Sightings at Sightings Over Sixty asks: “Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?” He and his wife have learned something new and different this summer, or as Sightings claims, they've even become experts on the topic. So zoom over to “Old Dog, New Trick” to find out what all the excitement is about. 

Manifesting big changes

Is manifestation real or just the result of an overactive imagination creating connections that don't really exist? Over at A Healing Spirit, Carol Cassara muses about an unexplained coincidence that led to a big life change.

Changing with aging

“When I'm 64?” You can’t imagine how old and wretched Laurie Stone of Musings, Rants & Scribbles pictured this age when she first heard this McCartney song in 1967. She still has about a week to go, but can’t help comparing the lyrics then to the reality today.

Listening to audio books

Have you been getting any reading done while we’ve been stuck at home? Rebecca Olkowski with BabyBoomster.com has been listening to audiobooks. It’s easier for her because of her contacts and aging eyes. She discusses the advantages of audiobooks in her latest post “Have You Been Listening to Audiobooks?” 

Figuring out your wardrobe when you move to Florida

September usually makes Jennifer Koshak of Unfold and Begin start to think about fall cleaning and changing out summer clothes but since she's moved to Florida things are different. Find out more in “The Blush of September.”

This is the Best of Boomer Blogs #667. Click on the links to read the articles. And be sure to leave a comment. Boomer bloggers love to hear from readers.

Copyright 2020, Rita R. Robison, Consumer and Personal Finance Journalist

Thoughts on 9/11

It’s hard to know what to say on the 19^th anniversary of the 9/11. The terrorist attacks changed the world.

Operation Enduring Freedom was launched, and the far-reaching, expensive, devastating, decades-long “war” against terrorism worldwide continues.

This year, we’re having the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve been staying home mostly since March. I haven't been able to travel to see my daughters in Sacramento and Madrid.

Now, we’re having record-breaking wildfires on the West Coast. Although I’m not in a fire danger area in my home near Seattle, the smoke in the air is heavy. I’ll be staying inside for at least the next several days.

I can’t even go out into my yard and walk around my house for exercise like I’ve been doing since March. I can’t scrape up the mole hill dirt or pull a few weeds.

Then, today would have been my niece’s 60^th birthday. She died Feb. 17. I miss her so much. She never liked it that 9/11 happened on her birthday.

Donating to wildfire relief? Watch out for scammers

Millions of acres of land across the West Coast, especially in Southern California, are continuing to burn and evacuations are still being ordered for many homes as the flames are being battled by firefighters.

There are more than 100 active large fires in California, Oregon, and Washington. High temperatures and wind conditions are contributing to fires.

If you want to help impacted families, firefighters, or both, here are some suggestions from the Better Business Bureau:

Baby Boomer get through Labor Day as they have other parts of covid-19 life

On Labor Day in my community, we usually celebrate Harbor Days. I go to the waterfront and take photos of the boats, people, and booths selling food and typical summer fair items.

This year, in the era of the coronavirus, we had Harbor Days Lite. No tug boat races were held.

People were encouraged to construct Lego tugboats, make a maritime display in their yard, enter a beach photo contest, see tugboat paintings online, go to an art show in the windows of a historic fire station, and watch videos of maritime music.

I didn’t bother to go to the waterfront. I took my own advice from the articles I wrote for Labor Day: Stay close to home for the holiday weekend.

Meanwhile, baby boomers are writing about:

Facts and figures for Labor Day 2020

As Labor Day approaches, it’s a time to celebrate American workers and take a look at how they’ve been impacted by the covid-19 pandemic. Although the United States is slowly regaining lost jobs, the national unemployment rate is still higher than normal at 10.2 percent as of July 2020.

The high level of unemployment, along with the continued spread of coronavirus and its huge economic impact, has led many American workers to be concerned about whether they’ll get laid off.

In these difficult times, WalletHub conducted a survey, which found that  The survey also had questions about people’s plans for Labor Day.

Below are highlights from the survey:

Source: WalletHub

Copyright 2020, Rita R. Robison, Consumer and Personal Finance Journalist

Estate Planning 3-2-1 – Part 1: Three key lists to keep with your estate plan

By Lauren A. Pitman, Attorney

Founder and Author of the Side by Side Planner

An estate plan is meant to make life easier for the people you love. You make it for yourself – so you maintain control over your medical decisions and the way your assets are distributed, to protect the legacy you’ve built – but really, it’s about the people you love.

It’s about lightening the load for them. If something happened to you, like an accident or injury, your loved ones would already be under a great deal of stress. The last thing they want to worry about is bureaucracy and paperwork.

That‘s where an estate plan comes in. You have done the work ahead of time, so your loved ones can focus on what is important: taking care of you and each other.

Make sure a scammer isn't getting employment benefits in your name

In Washington state where I live, scammers have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in employment benefits. The state, in a hurry to get payments to people needing funds during the pandemic, didn't have adequate safeguards in place to stop crooks. Now, the process has been slowed down to do more checking.

How are scammers doing this? They're filing claims for unemployment benefits, using the names and personal information of people who haven't filed claims. People learn about the fraud when they get a notice from their state unemployment benefits office or their employer about their supposed application for benefits.

If this happens to you, it means someone is misusing your personal information, including your Social Security number and birth date, said Seena Gressin, attorney for the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Consumer and Business Education. Gressin said to act fast using these steps to help protect your finances and credit:

Baby boomers ponder these times

Photo: .RGB.

America is in turmoil. Millions of Americans are pouring out into the streets to protest the death of George Floyd, a black man who was murdered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when a police office pressed his knee on his neck until he died. All this in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic. 

I'm stressed. I don't know what's going to happen next. Police reform? I hope so. Millions more getting the coronavirus and thousands more dying of it? I hope not. 

I've decided what I'm going to do in these challenging times is make a large contribution on an organization that works to improve my community, including working on homeless issues.

Our boomer bloggers are writing about what's going on in America and what's going on in their lives:

Black Lives Matter

The Black Lives Matter protests are swelling throughout the nation. As she reached out to her friends of color, Carol Cassara of Heart·Mind·Soul has learned more about what it means to be an effective ally. In "How Much Do Black Lives Matter to You?" she relates an impactful dialogue she had with a female friend; one that made even more vivid what people of color face every day of their lives. 

Jennifer Koshak of Unfold and Begin has been struggling with a lot of emotions lately; sadness, anger, and outrage, to name just a few. She was sickened by the casual way in which a cop murdered George Floyd, and while she doesn't know exactly what to say, she does have something to say.

Something that happened to Laurie Stone of Musing, Rants & Scribbles five years ago seems as relevant today as it did back then. She was in her neighborhood grocery store when she encountered a tall, middle-aged African-American man stocking shelves. He had a cart full of product and part of it blocked her way. She looked at him, smiling, saying, “Excuse me.” He turned and gazed at her, his eyes hard, face tight and unsmiling. And that’s when she saw it.

Travel

Rebecca Olkowski with BabyBoomster.com attended the American Travel Trends Forum online with guest speakers Peter Greenberg, Samantha Brown, Andrew McCarthy, and others. The tourism industry has been heavily impacted by the pandemic with over 100 million out of work. What does it need to do to come back? Rebecca reports on some of their thoughts and findings.

Bathing suits

Quarantine, recession, protest marches. It has been a long week. But it is also summer and time to relax a bit and enjoy the season, the weather, the warmth. Meryl Baer of Six Decades and Counting obliges with an upbeat post about swim suits. Summer’s here and that means bathing suits.

Social Security

Tom Sightings at Sightings Over Sixty had occasion to check on his Social Security benefits – which we all know can often be complicated and sometimes confusing. So he turned to financial guru Jeremy Kisner to find some important Social Security FAQ's ... which will answer (almost) any question you ever had about Social Security, including if and when it will go bankrupt.

These articles make up the Best of Boomer Blogs #653. Be sure to check out the articles and leave a comment. Boomer bloggers love to hear from readers.

Copyright 2020, Rita R. Robison, Consumer and Personal Finance Journalist

Trump sped up spread of covid-19 in 12 ways, consumer group says

Just three months after the first reported coronavirus-related death in the United States on Feb. 29, the confirmed covid-19 death toll in the nation has surpassed 100,000, far exceeding the number of confirmed deaths in any other country.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, President Donald Trump’s chaotic and incompetent response has fueled the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. and beyond, causing tens of thousands of preventable deaths, according to Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.

Here are 12 things Trump did to speed the pandemic and push the death count higher:

1. He didn’t prepare. For the first three years of his administration, he failed to take steps to prepare for a long-expected pandemic by expanding the inventory of critical medical supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile, strengthening the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and bolstering other critical components of our national public health system.

2. He ignored warnings. For several weeks starting in early January, he ignored early warnings about the grave threat posed by the coronavirus outbreak, squandering precious time needed to carry out proven measures that would have limited active community spread of the virus.

Happy Mother's Day 2020

I hope your Mother's Day is going well. For about the last 10 years, I've spent the month of May in Madrid with my daughter Lisa and her family. This year is very different. Although I bought a ticket in early March, it soon became apparent as the pandemic unfolded that I wouldn't be able to go this year. I'm tempted to head to Sacramento to visit my daughter Mona. However, that wouldn't be wise.

Also sad, Lisa and the kids won't be able to visit us this year in the United States in July, and, in addition, I won't be able to visit Spain for the holidays either.

For Mother's Day, Mona sent me flowers and chocolates, shown above, which were delivered Saturday. The delivery was a big surprise because the flowers were scheduled to come Monday. I opened the garage door to take a letter out to the mailbox. Right there, in my driveway was a white van with a guy was getting out of it. It was shocking because it's so long since I've had company or visited anyone.