Yet Alzheimer’s is the leading cause of dementia among older adults, with an estimated 6.2 million Americans currently suffering from it.¹ A diagnosis has long seemed like a tragic one-way ticket down a sure path of cognitive decline, and for good reason: Alzheimer’s disease was incurable, untreatable, and believed to be unpreventable. 

It isn’t anymore. 

In addition to the first-ever Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved drug that treats Alzheimer’s disease, ongoing research is proving that lifestyle changes within our control can go a long way in delaying or even preventing it. 

“That’s the out-of-box thinking,” says John Walker, chief technology officer and founder of uMETHOD Health, a precision medicine start-up. “At every point in this, you can control the progression.” 

A Multivariable Problem 

Walker’s expertise lies in building complex systems to solve complicated problems, and Alzheimer’s disease might be the most tangled knot he’s taken on. According to Walker, there are 40 or 50 factors at play in causing the disease: genetics, history, blood chemistry, lifestyle—all interacting and confounding. 

“This is a multivariable problem,” Walker says, “and the stinker is they interact with each other and they change.” 

Between the ages of 65 and 75, 5 percent of people have Alzheimer’s disease. That number rises to nearly 14 percent as we age past 75. By the time we’re 85, more than a third of us will have the disease.² 

It’s visible in our brains. Protein fragments of beta-amyloid clump into plaques outside our neurons while the abnormal form of the tau protein tangles up inside them. These and other changes can cause neurodegeneration, inflammation, shrinkage, and atrophy. The changes in our brains lead to changes in our lives, such as memory problems, impaired judgment, depression, and eventually physical impairment and death. 

Walker’s company is figuring out which of the interacting, overlapping factors to prioritize when it comes to preventing and slowing disease progression. And his work, and encouraging recent clinical research, is showing for the first time that it’s possible. 

An ongoing Finnish study known as FINGER was the first randomized controlled trial to prove that cognitive decline could be prevented through a combination of four lifestyle changes. And a modeling and meta-analysis published in The Lancet last year found that around 40 percent of worldwide dementias could theoretically be delayed or prevented. “It is never too early and never too late in the life course for dementia prevention,” the authors write. 

Research has also revealed that we have a much longer window in which to treat the disease—which is present well before any cognitive impairment sets in. 

“We know that Alzheimer’s starts 20 years, give or take, before the symptoms of dementia ever start,” explains Eric VanVlymen, a regional and executive director with the Alzheimer’s Association. “Dementia is really the end of a long process.” 

The fact that Alzheimer’s begins decades before any mental decline means there is ample opportunity to address it before it causes problems, ideally even pushing the disease progression so far out that we succumb to other ailments before our cognition ever slips. 

“A five-year delay in the onset of Alzheimer’s would cut the Alzheimer’s numbers in half,” VanVlymen says. 

So how do we do that? What factors are under our control that we can change in order to prevent or slow the progression of this disease? 

What You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s 

For those who already know they have Alzheimer’s disease, recent FDA approval of the drug Aduhelm offers a big dose of optimism. Though controversial for its accelerated approval and cost, Aduhelm is the first drug to actually slow disease progression. And since it is indicated for those who are not even showing cognitive impairment or have just begun to, it means people may be able to live with Alzheimer’s without ever developing dementia. 

But the exciting news that lifestyle changes can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s means popping a pill is only one thing you can do to fight back. The actions you can take are not extreme. They’re not even surprising. “It’s everything your doctor always tells you,” says VanVlymen. 

Findings from the FINGER study suggest four lifestyle approaches can help improve cognition among higher-risk elderly people. 

First, keep your brain active. And sorry, but soduku might not cut it. “There’s a difference between brain activity and learning,” VanVlymen says. “Active learning is really important.” Second, you truly do have to get off the couch. Physical exercise—even something as simple as walking—is another critical to-do. 

Third, research suggests eating a healthy diet is part of the answer. Diets clinically proven to combat cognitive decline are similar to the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet, which minimize processed foods and encourage vegetables, nuts, berries, and legumes. 

Finally, it’s critical to deal with cardiovascular risk factors like diabetes and high blood pressure. “The largest cardiovascular part of your system is your brain,” explains VanVlymen. “So, whatever is good for your heart is good for your brain.” 

Because these four things were tested all together, researchers have yet to tease out what lifestyle changes pack the most punch. But taken with other research findings, there are plenty of things under our control that seem to matter. 

“You actually have to sleep,” laughs Walker as he refers to a chart with dozens of factors at play in cognitive health. Avoid smoke and even air pollution if possible. Try to reduce your stress levels. And Walker says everyone should be asking their doctor for routine blood exams that check for the amino acid homocysteine; buildup can cause dementia, yet is easily treated with vitamins. 

“It’s a brain toxin,” he says. “And it’s just a two-dollar blood test, but it appears that no doctors ever do it.” 

Not that every fix is feasible. It might be easy enough to get help for sleep apnea or start a walking routine. But living next to a highway? That’s harder to fix. And since the past has a way of affecting your present health, comorbidities and medical history like previous head traumas or mid-life obesity will continue to influence your risk factors decades later. 

The goal, says Walker, is finding out where you stand so you can get to work on the things you can influence. That’s something uMethod offers, and after working with about 5,000 people, Walker has seen this personalized approach to brain health pay off. “Doctors will tell you about their patients who just are quite astonished that they can come back in six months and say, ‘I feel so much better. I’m thinking better,’” he says. 

The Future of Preventing and Treating Alzheimer’s 

The Alzheimer’s Association and others are racing to figure out how lifestyle changes can slow the disease progression, digging down to isolate which activities are most protective, and combining the data with brain scans that will show whether those changes have observable effects on the brain. 

In the next year or so, there will likely be approval for another two drugs to treat the disease, which VanVlymen hopes will create market pressure and drive prices down. “We’re going to be treating this disease with disease-modifying drugs that, frankly, we’ve never had,” he says. 

At the same time, scanning for Alzheimer’s will get more accessible and cheaper—and therefore more equitable. And greater access to personalized medicine will help people know exactly what they can do to keep their brains healthy, and how their brains respond to treatments and changes. 

The future of diagnosing and treating Alzheimer’s disease is full of hope. But when it comes to protecting ourselves and our loved ones, it is empowering to know we don’t have to wait. 

¹ Alzheimer’s Association, “Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures,” alz.org, 2021 

² Ibid

Since then, they’ve taken a 7,000-mile train trip, toured the country in their RV, and purchased a second home near their daughter, son-in-law, and three-year-old granddaughter. Their primary home, a 2,000-square-foot cabin in Blue Ridge, Georgia, is a step up from the vacation cabin they first moved to after selling their big family home in Atlanta. 

Recently, they added a woodworking shop that doubles as a writing studio for Gilbert, who is the author of a blog, The Retirement Manifesto, and a book, Keys to a Successful Retirement: Staying Happy, Active, and Productive in Your Retired Years. 

“We’re in the go-go years,” says Gilbert, 58. “We’re young, we’re healthy, we’re traveling. We are not worried. We are enjoying ourselves.” 

Are the Gilberts crazy not to worry? Or are they on to something? 

They are definitely on to something. 

While many American retirees do indeed need to scrimp in order to keep paying their bills, many others have a nicer problem, financial researchers say. 

If these well-funded retirees don’t start spending more of what they have, they may die with their nest eggs largely intact or expanded—even if they never consciously decided to do so. 

While surviving family members, charities, or other beneficiaries may appreciate such sacrifices, there’s a price, says Sarah Asebedo, an assistant professor in the school of financial planning at Texas Tech University. “The downside is life not lived,” she says. “If you don’t pull the money out, if you don’t spend it, what are you missing out on? What are you holding back on? What are you giving up?” 

The things you could miss out on—from travel to family time to doing good works—are exactly the things you probably saved for in the first place, she and other experts say. 

The Retirement Consumption Gap 

In the dry lingo of academia, this underspending problem is called the retirement consumption gap. It’s unclear how common this somewhat enviable affliction is. But recent research provides some clues. 

One study published in 2021 in the Journal of Financial Planning found that just 18 percent of newly retired Americans had enough wealth to keep spending at preretirement levels. But a funny thing happened as people settled into retirement. 

Almost everyone, at every wealth level, spent less. In most cases, this was a good move, a matter of right-sizing spending to fit available resources, co-authors David Blanchett and Warren Cormier reported. They found that 10 years into retirement, 48 percent of households had the resources to support their spending. 

But because well-funded households typically cut back on spending, as well, many actually spend much less than they could afford. 

“We see too many households err on the side of not spending when they’re younger in retirement” for fear of running out of money when they are older, says Blanchett, who is managing director and head of retirement research for PGIM DC Solutions, the global investment management business of Prudential Financial. 

Another study, also published in the Journal of Financial Planning in 2021, found that average retirees in the top three-fifths of income spent less than they took in from Social Security, pensions, investment earnings, and other income sources. The researchers, led by Asebedo’s Texas Tech colleague Christopher Browning, then looked at how that consumption gap might affect overall assets over a 30-year retirement under various investment scenarios. 

Their conclusion? Even if a generous 40 percent of the portfolio was set aside for late-in-life medical expenses and bequests, a retiree with a mid-level income might underspend by as much as 8 percent. The wealthiest retirees might use 47 percent less than they could safely spend. 

“Retirees in the top quintile of financial wealth were spending nowhere near an amount that would place them in danger of running out of money,” the researchers concluded. 

Understanding the Underspending Mindset 

Mike Gray, a CAPTRUST financial advisor based in Raleigh, North Carolina, says he sees plenty of people who haven’t saved and invested nearly enough to keep up their spending in retirement. These folks may have enjoyed six-figure incomes, nice homes, pricey vacations, and other trappings of a comfortable lifestyle, but they never saved more than the bare minimum in a 401(k) plan. Many are unpleasantly surprised to learn that they must live more modestly in retirement, he says. 

But Gray also sees plenty of potential under-spenders among diligent lifelong savers. For example, take a couple who have $3 million in retirement accounts and are used to living well within their means, Gray says. “If spending doesn’t change during retirement at all, and they don’t do any travel or anything outside the realm of their normal budget, what ends up happening is that their asset base grows year after year after year until they pass away.” 

All of a sudden $3 million is $12 million, Gray says. “You show them that and say, ‘OK, what do you want to have happen with this?’ And their eyes kind of go wide and they say, ‘Oh, wow, I never thought about that.’” 

But nudging people to spend more isn’t a simple matter of showing them an eye-popping projection. That’s because good savers often have personality traits that make them uneasy spenders, Asebedo says. In one study, she and Browning found some of the lowest portfolio withdrawal rates among people who showed the highest levels of conscientiousness. 

“These are the quintessential savers, the budgeters, the ones who have all the checklists,” she says. 

Spending more may literally make such people queasy, Asebedo says. 

“We expect people to just flip a switch once they get to retirement. We say, ‘OK, it’s time to take money out, it’s time to spend.’ And I think we underestimate what kind of a psychological leap that can be for a lot of people because of the years and years of blood, sweat, and tears and self-control it took to put that money in. It actually can feel painful and nauseating for some people to pull money out.” 

Blanchett agrees. “People spend all these years socking away money … then all of the sudden to change that mindset from ‘save, save, save’ to ‘spend, spend, spend,’ that’s just not easy.” He says many people envision their portfolios as “this gigantic pot of money” that must be protected because it can never be replaced. 

In fact, according to a September 2020 Employee Benefit Research Institute survey of 2,000 Americans ages 62 to 75, only 14.1 percent think they’ll spend down all their assets. Moreover, as shown in Figure One, nearly 60 percent plan to grow their assets in retirement, leave them untouched, or spend them down only a little. 

Source: Employee Benefit Research Institute 

The objections to spending go beyond gut feelings, of course. People who retire at 60 or 65 are worried about their healthcare needs if they live to be 90 or 95. Or they are worried they may need to financially support an aging parent or a struggling adult child. Some are highly motivated to leave large sums to their children, though Gray says such folks are in a distinct minority. Some have other bequests in mind. Many are worried about maintaining their lifestyles if markets tank in the future. 

The secret to loosening the purse strings without losing peace of mind? It’s all about planning. 

Enjoying the Well-Planned Retirement 

Allen Chamberlain, a retired schoolteacher and librarian from Richmond, Virginia, might seem like the sort of person who would have trouble spending her retirement savings. 

Chamberlain, 68, says she grew up with parents who “were pretty remarkable savers, even though they were not high income.” She tried to follow in their footsteps during her working years, contributing as much as she could to her retirement plan and sticking to a conservative but effective investment strategy. She also received an inheritance from her thrifty parents. 

Before she retired at age 65, she worked with her financial advisors, including Gray, to come up with a plan for making her money last. “I came up with a budget of what was really necessary and what was important to me, and that helped me see what was possible,” she says. 

Under her plan, she gets a monthly income from her portfolio that goes straight into her checking account. With that income, along with Social Security, she says she lives a comfortable but not extravagant life. 

One luxury she allows herself and has budgeted for is regular extended trips overseas to visit her grown daughter, Evie, who lived for several years in Edinburgh, Scotland, and now lives in Zurich, Switzerland. 

Chamberlain says her planning also allows for flexibility. She says that when she wanted to withdraw $30,000 to renovate two bathrooms in the home she shares with her partner of 31 years, she checked with her CAPTRUST advisors. 

They reassured her that the expense would not throw her long-term plans off track or force her to cut corners. “They were able to assure me that ‘you’ve got this,’ because of the careful planning in place.” 

Planning is also the secret to the Gilberts’ active lifestyle. Before he retired, Fritz Gilbert says he and his wife decided they could safely withdraw 3.3 percent each year from their portfolio. That’s in the conservative range recently endorsed by some financial forecasters worried about future market downturns, Gilbert notes. 

His plan also includes spending less in later years when healthcare costs typically rise but other wants and needs tend to decline. The Gilberts also plan to leave a pool of money available in case either of them needs costly long-term care. 

“You’ll never alleviate all the risks, but you do what you can to alleviate the most likely risks,” Gilbert says. 

And then, he says, you live your life and, ideally, think very little about money. Like Chamberlain, Gilbert has a paycheck sent monthly to his checking account. And that money, he says, is money he feels very comfortable spending. 

On a typical day at home, he is exercising, writing, or building something in his workshop. His wife is busy running a nonprofit called Freedom for Fido that provides doghouses and fences to families that would otherwise leave their dogs on chains. 

One week a month, they load up their own four dogs and head to their condo in Alabama to spend time with their daughter and her family. When money builds up in their checking account, they spend and enjoy it—because, Gilbert says, that’s why they saved it in the first place. 

“We are not recklessly optimistic,” he says. “But we live optimistically.” 

“Food is a key that unlocks everything,” says Robin Mather, a food writer for more than 40 years and author of The Feast Nearby. 

“It unlocks the cultures of our neighbors, it unlocks our own history, and it unlocks the history around the world,” Mather says, whose forebears came from Wales to work in the coal mines in Iowa. When she makes Welsh cakes (similar to scones) or cawl (a kind of lamb soup), Mather says she thinks about her family’s journey. 

Marcela Curry, of Raleigh, North Carolina, agrees that food is a way to maintain a link to your home and culture. 

“For me, because I am an immigrant to this country, it’s a way to stay connected to where I’m from and a great way to stay connected to who I am,” the native of Chile says. “As I’ve gotten older, it’s interesting how being an immigrant has become more important to me,” Curry says. 

Adapting to Change 

The traditional foods you grew up eating might not be quite the same here as those your family prepared in its country of origin. Don’t be disappointed if you can’t replicate a traditional dish exactly as you had it there. 

“Recipes for traditional foods are living things that evolve over time,” Mather says. “You see that in a lot of Italian recipes.” Some of the ingredients they were working with just weren’t available in the U.S., Mather says. For example, mortadella (a cold cut meat mixture) and sausages were nowhere to be found. “The Italian immigrants had to improvise on the spot.” 

That would also be true for many African and Asian people, Mather says, who couldn’t find the fruits and vegetables they were familiar with when they came to this country. They had to alter traditional dishes, while others had to change recipes to keep costs down. 

“When I was the food editor at The Detroit News, I had a colleague whose grandparents emigrated from Armenia, and as a teen, he lost his mother to breast cancer,” Mather says. “He was desperate to create his mother’s recipe for kibbeh (spiced grain and meat shaped into balls).” 

One day, she says, he burst into her office and said, “‘I got it, I got it! I figured it out!’” What he discovered was that his mother couldn’t afford the traditional ground lamb, so she used a mixture of three-quarters ground beef and one-quarter ground lamb. “That was the taste he remembered,” Mather says. 

Another consideration is that ingredients might be the same, but the flavor of the dish will be different, Curry says. “Chile is mountainous; volcanic soil is everywhere. The flavors of food are going to be different,” she says. “A cup of milk in the U.S. will taste very different from a cup of milk in Chile,” Curry says. 

Beef and pork might have a different taste because of the way the animals were raised and what they were fed. “If you go to the southern part of Chile and you have lamb, you will remember it,” Curry says. “The flavor and the smell of lamb when it’s cooked there is sweet; it’s just divine.” 

Explore from Home 

If you’re not able to travel, food is the best way to start learning about another culture or country, Curry says. 

“I had to teach myself to eat spicy food because I had never had it.” When she got to the U.S., because she spoke Spanish, when Curry went to a Mexican restaurant, people assumed that she knew the food, she says. “I had never had Mexican food before, so I had no idea what the menu was about,” Curry says. “But being exposed to Mexican food made me think, ‘Wow, the world is full of interesting stuff. What other kinds of foods are out there?’” 

Exploring cultures through specialty cookbooks is one way to start. However, if you want to prepare a traditional dish, the recipe might call for ingredients that aren’t available locally. Mather recommends turning to online vendors such as Penzeys Spices and The Spice House. 

Curry advises checking your television listings. 

“On Netflix, Taco Chronicles walks you through the food culture of Mexico.” It’s a fascinating way to learn about Mexican culture, Curry says. “A taco is not just a taco; the filling represents the food that is being grown in that region in Mexico.” TV is rife with shows about food from all corners of the world today: British baking, Asian street food, Mexican asado, and more. 

Local festivals are also a good way to explore a culture through cuisine. For example, where Mather lives in Arizona, there is the Tucson Meet Yourself festival. Other local resources you might find helpful could include ethnic and international grocery stores, specialty street markets and food stalls, cooking classes, cultural centers, and neighborhood churches. 

Travel to the Source 

“If money is no object, I would travel to a place where I could sign up for a series of cooking classes,” Mather says. “Working with someone in the country of your heritage, you’ll get a clear idea of how that food fits into your culture.” 

Curry enjoys exploring food when she travels. “I just go and salivate walking through the markets. I’m drawn to the smells when I walk by, and I have discovered some absolutely amazing things,” she says. 

If you’re planning a trip, she advises doing a little culinary homework before you go. “Do the research, and it’s not that difficult to figure out what good food is really all about,” Curry says. 

And she practices what she preaches. “When I travel for work, I’m notorious for disappearing, and you will find me at a restaurant, hopefully a Chilean or other Latin American restaurant,” Curry says. “The more styles of food you try, the more you understand how your food culture connects to others.” 

Making Connections 

Food can also be a way to tell your children about family history. Mather advises cooking with kids while telling stories about your parents and grandparents. Talk about the history of the dish, where it originated, and where it’s eaten today. Host a potluck for family, friends, or community and have each person bring a special dish to celebrate their culture. Or use a holiday, birthday, or the anniversary of a loved one’s passing to celebrate their life with a special meal. 

Curry says families frequently share their histories and cultures with their communities through food. “Food is a great way to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next and a great way to expose friends to another side of your personality.” 

Curry celebrates Chilean Independence Day with her family and friends by making empanadas (baked meat pies) and ensalada chilena (a salad with tomatoes and onions) served with wine from the South American country. Her empanadas have inspired more than one person to visit her homeland. 

Go backward, but also sideways and forward, Mather advises. Are you getting to know your own background? Your neighbor’s background? A culture in which you have an interest? No matter what, food is the key that will open any door. 

“Whatever your heritage is, eating the foods of that culture can help you connect to that heritage,” Mather says. “And if you’re fortunate enough to have memories of a person who emigrated, it will help you remember that person, as well.” 

At the age of 39, Entin suffered a massive stroke. Since then, he has been fighting his way back—not only to rebuild his body, but to launch a second act helping other stroke survivors. 

“God wanted me to take a new journey, a new path. I call it a stroke of luck,” says Entin, 49, of Tarzana, California. 

Go, Go, Go 

Entin’s drive to create new businesses started early. At age 21, while earning a degree in business administration and management with an emphasis on entrepreneurship, he was featured on the cover of the business section of the Los Angeles Times for launching a teen dance club. 

After graduation from the University of Southern California, he produced feature films, commercials, music videos, and a television show. He became one of the first fight managers in the mixed martial arts world, representing big names in the field, such as Mark Kerr and Tim Sylvia. 

Later, he moved from Los Angeles to San Diego to work with two start-up companies, collaborating with basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal. 

“I was raising money, building my companies, all the time looking for something new,” Entin says. “I was always connecting people. I was wound up too fast and too hard. I was go, go, go. I didn’t slow down, and something was bound to happen.” 

By age 39, Entin was on top of the world. He lived on the beach in San Diego with his wife and two daughters, then ages 18 months and four years. “I love being a dad,” he says. “I was born to be a father. We were always off to the beach, the zoo, Sea World.” 

Like a Sledgehammer 

By this time, Entin was involved with teaching entrepreneurship skills to Navy SEAL veterans. He also trained with them in mixed martial arts. “I loved the sport. I loved athleticism,” he says. But in the fall of 2011, when Entin was doing a mixed martial arts workout, he got choked out. 

“I passed out and wasn’t able to tap out,” Entin says. He went home that afternoon knowing something was wrong with his throat. 

For about four weeks after the incident, Entin continued to run his business and jet around the country despite the pain on the right side of his throat. On Thanksgiving weekend, he and his family were celebrating the holiday with friends in San Luis Obispo, California, when things got worse. 

“I woke up the night of Thanksgiving, and the room was spinning,” Entin says. “It felt like someone was bringing a sledgehammer to my head.” 

He walked to the bathroom. “As I looked in the mirror, the left side of my face was drooping badly. My face was ash gray,” Entin says. “I couldn’t speak, and I lost movement in my left arm.” At that moment he asked his wife, Stephanie, to call his dad, a retired medical doctor in Tarzana. 

“I think my son is having a stroke,” Dr. Allen Entin said. “Call the paramedics right now.” 

Entin was rushed to a nearby hospital, then medevacked to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, where Alois Zauner, a top neurosurgeon, began treating him. 

After several procedures didn’t work, Entin was put in a coma for 10 days. Then the surgeon performed a craniectomy and temporarily stored a piece of his skull in his abdomen to reduce the swelling on his brain. 

When Entin awoke from the coma, his father told him he was a paraplegic, paralyzed on his left side. 

“I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t walk,” Entin says. “I had a helmet on my head to protect my brain. I had a feeding tube. I had a peripherally inserted central catheter line going from my arm into my heart, and I had a scar on my head shaped like a horseshoe.” He was also frail, having dropped from a fit 175 pounds to 140. 

I Can, I Shall, I Will 

Entin was taken for inpatient neurorehabilitation at a hospital near his home in San Diego. “The first neuropsychiatrist who got a hold of me ran a couple of quick tests, and she said, ‘The right side of your brain is dead. Don’t think about driving, working, or walking for a long time.’” 

He fired her. 

Then he brought in a team of people who believed in him and adopted his new mantra: I can. I shall. I will. “I kept saying to myself every day, ‘Put yourself in the mindset that you can do anything and nothing is impossible.’ I knew if I kept moving,” Entin says, “I was going to keep improving.” 

What motivated him the most was the thought of not being able to hold, hug, or kiss his daughters. Entin says the greatest joy of his life comes from spending time with Savannah, now 14, and Shiloh, who is 11. “They are my why. My daughters are the reason I wanted to walk again, not sit in a wheelchair.” 

So, he worked from early morning until the evening, even calling in medical professionals on the weekends. “I called it my boot camp,” Entin says. “I couldn’t even sit up straight. I lost the whole left side of my body from my vision to hearing to swallowing to walking. I had to relearn to walk, dress, shower, and use the toilet.” 

After his stint in rehab, he went back home, but it was too hard on his wife to take care of two young children and him, so Entin moved back in with his parents in Tarzana. “I needed to heal. I needed to do my therapies,” he says. 

Of course, there were days and moments when he wanted to give up. 

“The physical side is painful. But the emotional trauma and the mental anguish was harder than the physical stuff at times,” Entin says. His rehabilitation took a toll on the people he loved—his parents, his family, friends, and his marriage, which ended in divorce. “Everybody felt so helpless, so angry, and so exhausted because they didn’t know what to do for me.”

A sense of humor helps, he says: “Humor heals, but it takes time to get through the pain, the sorrow, the depression, and the darkness.” Once you get through that, he says, your light shines brightly on everybody.

Transforming Lives

About 800,000 Americans suffer a stroke each year, and approximately two-thirds of these individuals survive and require rehabilitation, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. 

Many survivors can have prolonged recovery and some are left with residual neurological deficits. In fact, complete recovery can take months or even years. 

That is why, in 2018, Entin founded strokehacker.com and the associated Stroke Hacker Community, with one simple goal in mind: helping others hack their strokes or traumatic brain injuries (TBIs).

His work includes one-on-one coaching, encouraging survivors to face new challenges in their lives and helping them begin to plan a recovery road map.

When Entin is not doing national TV appearances or podcasts to tell people what’s possible with a resilient attitude, he works with the families of survivors. 

“You have to get the people around the traumatic survivors involved,” Entin says. His neurologist, S. Thomas (Tom) Carmichael, chair of the Department of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, agrees. “Survivors need a team of supporters,” Carmichael says. “They need a network of people who will help them recover, and they need a process.”

In addition to strokehacker.com, Entin has created Move 2 Improve, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation working on rehabilitating those who have suffered TBIs. Between his endeavors with the nonprofit and strokehacker.com, Entin’s goal is to help transform the lives of 1 million people overcoming any kind of traumatic injury—whether it’s a stroke or spinal cord injury—by 2030. 

“Sean is an enormous force for good for those around him,” Carmichael says. “He sees the good in people and brings out the best in them, urging them on to further achievement.” 

Entin never gives up, says Gloria Rios, his athletic trainer for the past five years and co-founder of the Stroke Hacker Community. “He always has hope, even when he’s down,” Rios says. “The one thing he didn’t lose through his stroke is his drive to excel and continue to look out for other people.” 

Entin does rehabilitation three times a week and is seeing improvements. But the signs of stroke are noticeable. “My left arm is still weak, my left fingers don’t work as well as they should, and I walk with a limp,” he says. 

However, he is not angry about what happened to him. 

“This was God’s way of me becoming someone new and better,” Entin says. “My stroke gave me a deeper understanding of kindness and compassion and most importantly, allowed me a chance to make a difference for others.” 

The Stroke Hacker 

Recognized as a thought leader and speaker in the stroke survivor community, Entin is helping survivors and those around them find new ways to work through challenges, break through plateaus, and begin planning their recovery based on tailored advice. 

The Stroke Hacker methodology uses a simple, yet powerful approach. 

Ask the important questions. What is your current situation and what do you want to achieve? What is your perspective on your situation, and how does that need to change to get there? What are you doing to accomplish your goals, and what behaviors do you need to change?

Assess opportunities. Each stroke survivor’s situation is unique and so are the opportunities available to them. With the support of the Stroke Hacker Community, those overcoming TBIs will have an expert in their corner to help them navigate the host of offerings and opportunities, such as modified therapies to best serve individual needs and custom planning to get them closer to recovery and independence. 

Work together to achieve the unbelievable. Overcome difficulties and achieve a new reality with a shared commitment and accountability. Your success is Stroke Hacker’s success.

For those who have suffered brain injuries, the Stroke Hacker Community is a place to share stories, accomplishments, and tips for improving overall health and wellness after a TBI. Subscribe at strokehacker.com to start receiving tips and insights into TBI recovery, or visit Stroke Hacker on social media.

Editor’s note: While sports metaphors may be clichés, as in this case, they often provide a laboratory for helpful life lessons. Whether you are a fan or not, I hope you will indulge this golf story as a vehicle for a few important investment (and life) lessons. I hope you’ll read on regardless.

Heading into the final hole, Jean van de Velde held a seemingly insurmountable lead. All he had to do was score better than a triple-bogey seven, and he would be the champion of the 128th Open Championship. The victory would be the first major tournament win by a Frenchman in more than 90 years.    

Despite holding a three-stroke lead on the final hole of a major tournament, van de Velde pulled out his driver. Fortunately, his tee shot ended on the 17th hole. He was fortunate because the shot was so far right that it carried the water bordering the 18th fairway. Following the errant tee shot, van de Velde could still play it safe and cruise to victory. However, he chose the more aggressive strategy, attempting to reach the green with his second shot. After ricocheting off a grandstand and bouncing off a rock in the Barry Burn, the second shot settled in an area of deep rough.

Van de Velde’s challenges continued as his third shot landed in the water, followed by his fifth shot finding the deep greenside bunker. When the ball finally found the hole on his seventh shot, he had lost his insurmountable lead and, ultimately, lost the Open Championship in a playoff.

The events that led to van de Velde’s collapse at the 1999 Open Championship are similar to the challenges investors frequently face, and the outcomes can, unfortunately, be the same. Many investors learn their major investment lessons the hard way.

Here are a few thoughts to expedite your learnings—or remind you of a few timeless lessons.

Know the Score

Many have questioned whether van de Velde actually knew he was three strokes ahead. Over the past 30 years, we have seen numerous examples of investors with seemingly large leads pull out their driver when all that is required to win is to keep the ball in the middle of the fairway. Typically, these investors have not paused to check their score and continue their strategies focused on building a lead. 

Investing is a competition, but an investor’s only opponent is the important financial goals he or she sets for the future. Unfortunately, there are no easy-to-observe scoreboards along the course, so investors rarely check their scores—or, potentially more harmful, they check the market’s scorecard to determine if they are winning.

In the absence of knowing the score, the required decision must be to try for more.

It’s about Time

Another important investing lesson surrounds time. Time is a uniquely critical variable in nearly every decision. Time can be a risk and a risk-reducer. Too much time is a potential risk, and too little time is a potential risk. Consequently, it is imperative to understand how time impacts a decision’s risk profile. 

The stock market has been incredible at healing itself. While individual companies have come and gone, with sufficient time, the market has always recovered. Historically, the simple formula for investment success has been: Protect the downside, and the upside has taken care of itself. 

While the formula is simple, it’s not easy. Protecting the downside does not mean attempting to avoid the downside; that’s likely a formula for failure. Van de Velde would not have been in a position for victory if he had not taken calculated risks of loss along the way. Rather, protecting the downside is about never being forced to turn a potentially temporary decline into a permanent loss, which most often happens when time runs out. 

Van de Velde’s mistake was not triple bogeying a hole. Rather, it was triple bogeying the final hole when he had the most to lose and, more importantly, the least amount of time to recover. Saving for retirement requires emotional discipline, financial sacrifices, and adequate time to capture the full power of compounding.

An early mistake in the investing journey can be overcome; a late mistake, when the stakes are highest and time is shortest, can be catastrophic.

Probability, Not Magnitude

Napoleon Bonaparte said, “The greatest danger occurs at the moment of victory.” Unfortunately, many investors can’t even define what financial victory looks like, and for those that can, it’s terribly difficult to declare it. The thrill of winning is often more fun than acknowledging “I’ve won,” so they overconfidently continue to play the same game, focused on what can go right, and they never stop to question what can go wrong.

The decision to hit his driver on the final hole will forever be questioned. Not because of van de Velde’s abilities—his aggressiveness and execution on the 18^th hole was one of the primary contributors to his large lead, having birdied the hole two out of three previous rounds—but because the risk far outweighed the reward. The reward for being right was to win by three (or more) strokes. The risk of being wrong was to not win at all. 

Following the death of his dear friend Joseph Heller, The New Yorker published this classic poem written by Kurt Vonnegut:

Joe Heller

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island. 
I said “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” 
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” 
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” 
Not bad! Rest in peace!

It is critical for investors to clearly define what success looks like to them, and if they are fortunate to be able to declare victory, stop the game and be thankful for having enough.

Comprehensive Financial Planning

An individual’s investment strategy is just one element of your comprehensive financial plan. The planning process helps you clearly define what victory means. It identifies the future financial goals that you are competing against and establishes a strategic spending-saving-investment game plan focused on maximizing the probability of success—not the magnitude of success! Finally, it provides the necessary context you need to accurately check your current financial scorecard and allows you to know how much longer you need to compete.

Heying (pronounced Hi-ing), 50, who has a Bachelor of Science degree in social work as well as a Master of Pastoral Ministry degree, grew up in Ossian, Iowa. The youngest of seven siblings, she learned the value of caring for the less fortunate from her devout Catholic parents.

“My oldest brother has Down’s syndrome,” Heying says. She remembers her parents were told to put their disabled son in an institution and move on with their lives. “But that was not the choice they made,” she says. Instead, Heying grew up with a fierce understanding of making room for everyone.

After graduating from college, she worked for more than a decade as a social worker and pastoral minister for St. Stephen’s Human Services, an independent nonprofit organization fighting poverty and homelessness. There, she learned firsthand how important car repair is for people who are underserved.

“I heard it repeatedly,” says Heying. Clients told her, “I can’t afford to get my car fixed, and I’m going to lose my job.” Without the ability to pay rent, they could easily find themselves living on the streets. 

Oftentimes, she helped someone push a broken-down vehicle around the block so it wouldn’t get towed.

Clients would live in their cars when they couldn’t get a bed at the homeless shelter, Heying says. One client stayed in his automobile so frequently that when he applied for a job, he would give his address as 1994 Nissan Maxima Avenue.

“The details of the stories were different, but everything depended on a car repair,” she says. She was plagued with a recurring thought: Somebody should do something about it. 

The Pros and Cons

Heying began agonizing over returning to school to become an auto mechanic. She loved her social services career and was still paying graduate school loans. “I wrote a pro and con list, and there was nothing in the pro column,” she says.

“You know it’s a calling—or something bigger—when you make a list and there is nothing in that pro column, but you can’t stop thinking about it,” Heying says. “There was no logical reason to do it, but I kept seeing the need and thought, ‘Somebody needs to make this happen.’”

So, at age 38, Heying enrolled in a two-year associate degree program in auto technology at Dunwoody College of Technology. “I went into the whole thing reluctantly,” Heying says. She walked into the first day of class thinking, “Why am I taking out more student loans to get a degree I don’t particularly want to get, that I don’t know if I’ll be good at, to meet a need I don’t know how to meet?” 

Shutting Out Self-Doubt

Heying had changed the oil in her motorcycle a few times but knew little else about auto repair. “I’m good at organizing people and talking about feelings,” Heying says. “Those are more my wheelhouse than fuel injection.”

She remembers her first day of class at Dunwoody. Automotive instructor Dave DuVal told the students to face the wall where the crankshafts were hanging. Heying didn’t know which way to turn, so she followed the lead of the young men in the class. “I was very much a novice,” Heying says. “It was a huge and humbling learning experience.”

Heying doubted her decision for months, she says. “The whole thing was awful. I loved Dunwoody, let me be clear, but in a program that is designed largely for 18-year-old boys, there is a different energy and style that involves a lot of yelling and drill-sergeant-like talking.”

She often thought she didn’t fit in and considered giving up. “Halfway through the first semester, I could not flare brake lines for the life of me,” Heying says. “I couldn’t do it, and, one day, I burst into tears.”

Embarrassed and humiliated, she was ready to quit, but DuVal talked with her. Heying told him about the need in the community for reasonably priced auto repairs. That day, DuVal told Heying she had a great vision and committed to helping her every step of the way.

She finally got the brake line flared and kept forging ahead.

Showtime

While attending Dunwoody, Heying continued working as a social worker. After her 2010 graduation, she honed her skills with a part-time job at a Sears Auto Center. She started to research her next steps by talking with lawyers, financial experts, executive directors of nonprofit organizations, and garage owners. Then, in April 2013, with one rented bay, Heying opened The Lift Garage in Minneapolis, a nonprofit car repair shop that offers low-cost automobile repairs and heartfelt advice to those in need.

The garage had one customer the first day. The first person appointed to The Lift Garage’s board of directors, Dunwoody automotive instructor Dave DuVal, was onsite—ready and willing to help repair an old Jeep Cherokee owned by a woman with disabilities. The car “was in shambles,” DuVal says. “It needed brakes and steering components.”

DuVal and Heying spent two weekends getting the Cherokee going. “That woman was so thankful,” DuVal says. “Seeing [the owner’s] gratitude was the fuel that kept feeding our innate desire to help these folks.”

From there, it went crazy, Heying says. Initially staffed by volunteers, The Lift Garage now employs 12 people, including five mechanics operating five bays in a garage the nonprofit purchased in 2020. They see 130 cars a month. Appointments are scheduled a month in advance, and there are always hundreds more people wanting repairs.

Prioritizing Dignity

The staff’s work goes beyond tuneups and oil changes, says Heying. It’s the human side of the work that’s rewarding to her. “I regularly joke that we are social workers, resource specialists, grief counselors, and financial counselors—and we fix cars on the side,” she says. In fact, The Lift Garage’s core values are hospitality and dignity. “We try to meet people where they are,” Heying says. “Most people who walk through the door are in some level of crisis.”

There are a lot of pieces to it, says Heying, who helps customers think through and resolve issues in a way that honors their lives, experiences, and intelligence: “We try to leave a lot of room for grace, knowing there is always more to the story than what we see.”

In some cases, Heying has to tell customers that their vehicle is not worth repairing, or that it wouldn’t be safe to drive, even with repairs. Recently, she told a gentleman that his 1998 Buick LeSabre with 280,000 miles would cost $1,800 to repair, but the vehicle was worth only about $800. He chose to repair it because he said he couldn’t buy a better vehicle for $1,800.

“We don’t invest in vehicles if the transmission is gone or there is catastrophic rust in structural areas,” Heying says. “People sometimes beg us to do it, but we draw a hard line. It’s a matter of liability and conscience.”

Besides repairing automobiles, the garage offers a free pre-purchase inspection program, so people can have a used car evaluated before they buy it. That saves a lot of heartaches and costly repairs in the long run. The Lift Garage also has a mobile van with a crew that does small repairs onsite at people’s homes and examines broken-down cars to see if they’re worth towing to the shop.

A Look at the Ledger

The finances of the organization have always been solid because the nonprofit has scaled its growth properly, says Atom Robinson, a longtime friend of Heying’s and original board member. “But every year when we pass the budget, we know there are more needs in Minnesota than we can meet.”

Customers pay $15 an hour for labor and get parts at cost. “They pay a third of what they’d pay for the same repair in a market-rate garage,” Heying says. The garage is open to anyone in Minnesota whose income meets 150 percent of Federal Poverty Guidelines or below, which is roughly $20,000 or less for a household of one and $26,000 or less for a household of two, she says. Customers provide proof that they qualify for the services—often a food stamp card is enough. “We make it as barrier-free as possible.”

Operating the business costs about $120,000 a month, with $25,000 to $30,000 coming from earned income and the rest covered by donations and fundraising, Heying says. “It costs us the same to run our garage as the commercial one down the street,” she adds. “We have the same overhead with insurance, mortgage, equipment, staff, and shop supplies.”

“We don’t get any government funding,” says Heying. “The money we have is privately raised through individuals and company donations and fundraising events.”

Individual donors contribute about 60 percent of funds. “I have a nun who gives us $5 a month,” says Heying, “and another person who gives $100,000 a year, but the majority of our donors give $100 to $200 annually.”

The Payoff

One single mom who worked for a social service agency brought in a vehicle someone from her church had given her, Heying says. “We got the car safe and running, and she stopped by later to tell us she was able to take a job as a case manager because she had a car.” It was music to Heying’s ears when the customer told her, “I don’t qualify for your services anymore because I make too much.”

DuVal says Heying is inspiring: “I believe in her, and I will do whatever it takes to help the folks she’s helping. She’s just that giving.” 

Board member Robinson agrees. “She is one of the biggest-hearted people I’ve ever met. A lot of us have great ideas and think we can help people in need and change the world, but it takes a special person to stick with it and do it.”

The Lift Garage is valued by the community, Robinson says. “Our donors are deeply invested, and the staff is top-notch. [Heying] is an outstanding boss and an excellent community leader. The staff might make more money if they were working in a private garage, but they believe in our mission.”

As for Heying, “I would never have guessed my life would be here at The Lift Garage, but I don’t regret it,” she says. She feels lucky at the end of the day. “I am proud of myself for not giving in to the fear and all the reasons that I should not have done this,” she says. “It has been an astounding journey.”

Extending Compassion Amid Chaos

In May 2020, during the unrest following the death of George Floyd after being arrested by police outside a shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Cathy Heying and the staff of The Lift Garage offered protesters the same grace that they offer customers every day.

“Several days and nights, we were here guarding the space,” says Heying. “If we saw someone walking up with clear intentions of harming the building, I would say, ‘Hey, could I help you?’ They’d say, ‘Is this your building? Sorry, man.’ And off they’d go.”

Heying says the Arby’s next door, which is 10 feet away, burned down to the ground one evening. “The wind was in our favor that night,” says Heying about narrowly escaping residual damages from the fire. However, her nonprofit auto repair shop was not entirely spared.

The Lift Garage was broken into, she says. “And the mobile van the crew uses to do small repairs on-site at people’s homes was broken into and robbed.” But, Heying says, “compared to most of our neighbors, we survived [the protests] quite well.”

Shortly after, a reporter from the largest newspaper in Minnesota, the Star Tribune, was onsite writing about the damage. As she cleaned up the rubble from the night before, Heying told the reporter it was her hope “to expand her garage to help more people after the Black Lives Matter protests.”

Some 30 years ago, an amateur fossil collector named Kathy Wankel made a breathtaking find while camping with her family at the Fort Peck Reservoir in Montana. On a rocky island where they were boating, she saw the corner of a bone sticking out of a bank. 

A month later, she was able to chip out a set of long bones and take them to the nearby Museum of the Rockies. Experts there identified them as something very rare indeed: the first arm bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex that had ever been found. The discovery led to the eventual excavation of an almost complete skeleton, and Wankel’s T. rex now resides at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. 

Finding a fossil in the wild—and putting your own hands on physical prehistoric remains—is a thrilling way to connect with Earth’s deep past. Collecting fossils is also an absorbing, addictive activity, one that is available to almost anyone and can make you feel like a kid digging up buried treasure. Fossils are found in many parts of the U.S., including slabs and chunks of petrified wood in the West, ancient shark and megalodon teeth along the East Coast shorelines, and exquisite ammonite shells in the Great Plains and other regions. 

A Lesson on Common Fossils 

Ammonites. Shells of squidlike creatures that were plentiful in the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods can be less than an inch in size or up to nine feet wide. They swam in the oceans that once covered the Great Plains of North America, the Himalayas, and Antarctica, until they were extinguished along with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. 

Brachiopods. Commonly preserved in rocks such as limestone, sandstone, or mudstone that formed from marine sediments, these fossils look like clams, though they aren’t actually closely related to modern mollusks. They were so abundant in the Paleozoic Era that they formed part of the ancient reefs. 

Corals. Coral fossils are found around the world, and some specimens are more than 500 million years old. Corals are relatives of sea anemones and jellyfish that secrete calcium carbonate to form their exoskeletons. The beautiful patterns of their bodies are found in fossilized form. 

Shark teeth. The teeth of the giant megalodon, a relative of the modern great white shark and the largest fish ever known, are the state fossil of North Carolina. Fossilized shark teeth—which turn black in the mineralization process—are plentiful in Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Florida. A collection of 80-million-year-old specimens was recently discovered in the remains of an Iron Age house at an archaeological site in Jerusalem, evidence of how timelessly fascinating they are to collectors. 

Petrified wood. Petrified wood can be so well preserved and detailed that the bark and woody structures of the ancient tree are clearly recognizable. Sometimes, collectors don’t realize that they are fossils rather than recently felled branches until they pick them up and feel their weight. 

How to Hunt for Fossils 

Look in the right kind of rock. Fossils are formed only when an animal or plant is rapidly submerged and preserved, which means they’re mainly found in sedimentary rock, such as shale or sandstone, that has horizontal layers like pancakes. If you search in igneous or metamorphic rock, which has been subjected to extreme heat and pressure that destroys any animal or plant matter, you’ll be wasting your time. 

The best fossil-hunting grounds are areas where the topsoil has been cut or weathered away—like dry creek beds, rocky outcrops, sea cliffs, beaches at low tide, or riverbanks. Old quarries are a great place to look for fossils since the underlying rock has been exposed. 

Train your eyes. Prepare for your search by looking at images of fossils you’re likely to find in your search area on museum and university websites. Learn the telltale patterns of marine creatures and plants, since most fossils are sea creatures that lived in the ancient oceans. 

Consult local experts. Ask a local museum, nature center, university geology department, or fossil club to find out about fossil-rich areas, established dig sites, and rules for hunting and collecting. Budding rockhounds can also search for fossil clubs near them on Google, check an online interactive map of national fossil clubs at myfossil.org/paleosocieties, or seek out a fossil meetup group. 

Gather your tools. You can spot fossils with just your eyes and some luck, but there are some optional items that might be helpful, starting with a hammer, such as a bricklayer’s hammer, a chisel, a small shovel, and a mesh screen for rinsing loose gravel. Have newspaper or tissue on hand to wrap fragile specimens and a pencil and paper for labeling and taking notes. Hunters will typically carry these items, along with a magnifying glass, gloves, and a map of the dig site in a backpack. If you’re going to be chiseling or hammering, safety glasses are recommended as well as a hard hat if any rocks overhead could be unstable. Remember to wear comfortable shoes and pack some water and snacks to keep your energy up. 

Know the rules. Every state has its own laws governing fossils, permits, and collection, so be sure to do your research. Some fossil sites charge admission fees or have rules about what tools you can use or how much material you can take for yourself. On private property, you’ll need to get permission from the owner before you remove or collect any fossils. 

Keep in mind that taking any natural objects, including fossils, from national parks is illegal. On other federal land, such as land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management or the U.S. Forest Service, you are permitted to take small amounts of common, invertebrate fossils or petrified wood for personal use (not for sale), but you can’t collect any amount of vertebrate fossils without a special permit. 

Getting Started 

When fossil hunting at a quarry or rocky outcrop, it’s best to get really close to the rock and look carefully for spiral patterns or shell prints. A magnifying glass can be helpful. Sit or kneel down in one place at a time, and examine them for patterns or details. If you spot something that may be a fossil, take your time to determine your next move. Act slowly and deliberately to avoid damaging it. 

To get at a fossil that’s embedded in rock, you can chisel carefully all the way around it—always pointing the tool away from the fossil. The best way is to carve out a chunk of material, like a pillar, that contains the whole specimen. Then, strike at the base of the pillar to break it off. Another method, if you have a very fossiliferous chunk, is to tap with a hammer until the rock breaks away around the fossils, according to the Illinois State Geological Survey Prairie Research Institute. 

However, if you find a high-quality fossil that you don’t think you can remove without damage, consider leaving it in place and taking photos only. That way, it will be preserved and may naturally loosen from the rock over time. 

Label your finds, and make a note of the exact locations they were found. This information is part of the story of the fossil. At home, you can clean your fossils with a soft brush, soap and water, or a short vinegar soak. Photographing the fossil from many angles is a good idea, as it will make it easy to share your story online or with a fossil club. 

For those who want to jump headfirst into fossil hunting, consider joining a paleontology-themed field trip. For example, the Bighorn Basin Paleontological Institute offers an exciting opportunity to work alongside scientists in the fossil-rich and rugged landscapes of Southern Montana and Northern Wyoming. 

Amateur fossil hunters can also get up close and personal with incredible prehistoric creatures from the comfort of their couches. The Smithsonian National Museum of History allows virtual visitors to explore either in a web browser or in virtual reality. While you’re there, make sure to check out the 31,000-square-foot David H. Koch Hall of Fossils to explore ancient ecosystems and visit over 700 fossil specimens, including a Tyrannosaurus rex, Diplodocus, and woolly mammoth. 

Fossil hunting is a great way to expend some pent-up wanderlust, embrace your inner scientist, and perhaps even collect some bragging rights. And why not? Budding fossil hunters of all ages and walks of life are uncovering an array of paleontological treasures each and every day. 

Giving up car ownership is not something everyone can do, says MacEachern, who has since bought her own hybrid vehicle. But her experience illustrates something she’s learned about greener living: “Almost everything you do to improve your environmental impact improves your own life.” 

Living lighter on the land also tends to fatten your wallet, says MacEachern, who runs a blog called Big Green Purse (and wrote a 2008 book by that name). Whether you are talking about insulating your attic, buying energy-efficient appliances, or eating less meat, “in almost all cases, the greener choice is the choice that’s going to save you more money,” she says. “Sometimes it’s in the short run, sometimes it’s in the long run.” 

That isn’t to say that there are not trade-offs, sacrifices, or challenges. But they are challenges that an increasing number of Americans, of all ages, may be willing to take on—at least, if they can sort through which actions really make a difference. 

Surveys Say: Older Americans Do Care 

Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2021 and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in 2019 found that concern about climate change—the most pressing environ-mental issue today—is highest among young people. But the Yale survey also found that majorities of baby boomers (born 1946 to 1964) and the silent generation (born 1928 to 1945) felt that combatting the problem was personally important. 

In another survey from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Age Lab, a majority of boomers said they were more environ-mentally aware now than in their own young adulthoods. 

Moreover, many boomers (and slightly younger generation-x adults) have better environmental records than their children and grandchildren give them credit for. The lab’s director, Joseph Coughlin, wrote in a Forbes blog post: “They are, after all, the generation that came of age in the years that included the publication of Silent Spring and the passage of the Clean Air Act … As college students, boomers celebrated the first-ever Earth Day in 1970. Retiring boomers and gen xers may have a new job in retirement—a renewed environmental activism.” 

That activism can take collective forms, such as volunteering for community efforts or getting involved in changing local, state, and national policies. But it also can take the form of individual, everyday choices: how we get around, what we eat, what we buy, and how we manage our households. 

All of those activities help determine our carbon footprint, the extent to which each of us contributes, directly or indirectly, to the buildup of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Those gases, generated mostly by the burning of fossil fuels for heat, electricity, and transportation, accumulate in the Earth’s atmosphere where they trap heat. The result is warmer average temperatures, more extreme weather, more polluted air, and increases in human health problems, ranging from asthma to heat stroke. 

But older adults, including retirees, are in a perfect position to limit the damage, experts say. A lot of them are looking for solutions to simplify their lives in ways that happen to be environ-mentally friendly, such as downsizing their homes, eating more healthfully, and moving to more walkable places, says Todd Larsen, executive co-director for consumer and corporate engagement at Green America, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. 

Retirement Going Green 

Gail White, 69, a retired investment advisor, says she became passionate about protecting the environment more than 30 years ago, when a trip to Alaska awakened her to the planet’s vastness and beauty. 

That experience inspired her to go to the Arctic as a volunteer citizen scientist to assist researchers studying climate change. When she retired in 2016, she gave up an energy-guzzling house and downsized to an apartment. Then, in 2019, she made another move—to a Shelburne, Vermont, retirement community designed for eco-conscious seniors. 

On the wooded Wake Robin campus, White is surrounded by like-minded folks who garden, compost, harvest honey, and maintain walking trails. “I just decided this was the kind of place where I wanted to be,” she says. Her main job, as co-chair of the recycling committee, is green room monitor, meaning she makes sure paper recyclables, plastic bags, composting materials, and other items all end up in the right bins. 

More and more retirees are seeking communities that make green living a priority, says Andrew Carle, executive director of The Virginian, a retirement community in Fairfax, Virginia. “I think our industry is beginning to recognize that this is something that our consumers value,” says Carle, who is an adjunct lecturer in senior living administration, aging, and health at Georgetown University. 

Carle says his own community gets greener all the time. One recent change: the purchase of an electric SUV to transport residents. “They love it that it gets ‘infinity miles per gallon,’” he says. As part of an ongoing renovation, the community will seek Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, a designation for buildings that meet energy efficiency, clean air, and other green standards. Many new communities now meet those standards at opening, Carle says. 

Meanwhile, at Wake Robin, “the residents are looking at all kinds of ways to improve our carbon footprint, like doing laundry at off-peak hours,” says Environmental Services Director Leslie Parker. 

The community recently replaced gas lawn mowers with electric versions, and it gets 20 percent of its power from a nearby solar farm. Ladybugs, released by the thousands each year, are the pesticides of choice. “It’s all part of the fabric of our community,” Parker says. 

Calculate Your Footprint 

Still, choosing a place to start as an individual—or a way to expand your efforts—can be daunting. A good way to get a reality check and a sense of direction is to calculate your current carbon footprint. 

Several online calculators are available, including one offered by Berkeley at coolclimate.berkeley.edu/calculator. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also offers a version at www3.epa.gov/carbon-footprint-calculator. 

The calculators let you see how your household compares with others of the same size and income when it comes to generating emissions from travel, your home, your food choices, and the other goods and services you consume. Once you know where you have room for improvement, you can take on new challenges one at a time. 

“It’s good to look at where your actions will have the most impact and where your interests lie and find the correlation between the two,” Green America’s Larsen says. 

Alexandra Zissu, an eco-lifestyle expert and author of several books, including The Conscious Kitchen, says it’s important to acknowledge that changing lifelong habits can be difficult. She says she often hears from older adults who are mystified or angry about the environmental changes that their children or grandchildren want them to make. Her advice: “Don’t do the stuff that makes you angry. Think about what you want to do and do what’s most compelling to you.” 

Start Small 

Recycle, of course. Check the website of your local collection agency and whatever you do, don’t guess what’s allowed in your bins. Stop wasting paper—remove yourself from catalog mailing lists, and opt for digital receipts instead of printed copies. Find new uses for old things, and throw as little into the trash as possible. It’s also a good idea to get yourself into the habit of shutting off lights when you leave a room. Once your smaller changes become habits, consider some bigger changes. 

Apocalypse Now? 

While the website’s readers included several great films from the past decade, including Parasite, The Shape of Water, Knives Out, and a few other Academy Award Best Picture nominees, they also included nine superhero movies, 12 sequels, and any number of movies that will certainly fail the test of time. 

Rotten Tomatoes’s readers seem to have some fondness for classic films, as shown in Figure One, but the 50-year period from the 1960s through the 2000s appears to have been a vast movie wasteland—with only eight movies on the list. Surprisingly, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Schindler’s List are the only films on the list for the 30-year period from 1980 until 2009. 

What about The Big Chill, Titanic, and Million Dollar Baby? More importantly, what is going on with Rotten Tomatoes readers? 

Answer: Like most humans, they suffer from recency bias. 

Figure One: Top 100 Movies by Decade 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Recency bias is a cognitive bias that causes us to place too much emphasis on recent events or experiences—even if they are less relevant. Conversely, recency bias causes us to deemphasize events further into the past. Specifically, recency bias is a memory bias, a type of cognitive bias that enhances, impairs, or alters the recall of a memory. 

In a nutshell, recency bias results from our brain’s preference for more easily accessible information over the harder work of analysis and decision-making. We prefer matching patterns from recent memory to deeper, intentional thought.

Maybe misremembering movies—like how good Road House really is—isn’t such a bad thing, but, like many cognitive biases, recency bias can also keep us from making high-quality decisions in other aspects of our lives. 

For example, after an hour-long job interview, you’ll likely recall the last 20 minutes of your conversation more vividly than the first half. That means you will perceive a candidate who starts strong and finishes weaker more negatively than you would have otherwise. The converse is true as well. And candidates interviewed later in your process will be more likely to advance. 

Meanwhile, in competitions such as the Eurovision Song Contest and world and European figure skating, Wändi Bruine de Bruin, provost professor of public policy, psychology, and behavioral science at the University of Southern California, found in her research that judges gave higher marks to competitors who performed last. 

Wall Street

Of course, recency bias affects us as investors as well, and it can be hard to avoid, partly because it is informed by facts. Not just facts—but recent facts that may seem indisputable due to their freshness. 

During a stock market selloff, it’s easy to believe that stock prices will keep falling. Think back to early last year when the first coronavirus-induced waves of selling hit the market. It seemed like the bottom dropped out. And it did … right up until the breathtaking rally that recovered all of their lost ground (and more). Conversely, investors tend to jump on board during the tail end of a market rally only to be surprised that the rally doesn’t continue. 

Here are three investing narratives supported by recency bias that will be true right up until they aren’t.

The market’s at an all-time high, so it’s not a good time to invest. If you’re prone to believe this, you will find ample proof, even as the market continues to hit new record levels. Rather than failing to invest, it might be more productive to create a dollar-cost-averaging program to move into the market in increments. That way, you can both participate in any future records and take advantage of an eventual pullback.

Growth stocks are doing so well, I don’t need to own value stocks. Growth stocks have, indeed, done well for the past several years when compared to value stocks. While it might be tempting to jump ship on your value stocks, mutual funds, or exchange-traded funds, ensuring that you have exposure to both is wise. This trend will end at some point, perhaps with a vengeance.

All I need is a simple portfolio of 60 percent U.S. stocks and 40 percent bonds. According to Morningstar, if you had invested $100,000 in a simple, cost-effective strategy like this in 1980, rebalanced it quarterly, and stayed the course—fees and taxes aside—your portfolio would be worth $6.8 million. That’s a 10.86 percent annualized total return over a 40-plus-year period. Wow! Why wouldn’t you just do that? 

The easy answer is that the next 40 years cannot possibly look like the past 40 years. Much of the return of that minimally diversified portfolio came from exposure to U.S. bonds during an extended period of falling interest rates. During that period, the yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury fell from 13.6 percent to 1.3 percent today. That literally cannot happen again.

Not Mission Impossible

While it might seem difficult to do, you can thwart recency bias—or at least minimize it—to help yourself make higher-quality investment decisions. 

Get historical. In the immortal words of Mark Twain, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” Pulling back the lens to view the longer sweep of history is often a helpful input into decision-making. For example, in the turmoil of a market pullback, looking at the frequency of past corrections could inform your view. History tells us that 5- and 10-percent pullbacks happen every year or two and that a 20 percent pullback is likely every seven years or so.

Look downstream. Making sure that you understand the implications of your decision may be helpful. Are there transaction costs? Will you owe significant taxes if, for example, you sell a highly appreciated position? How will you reinvest the proceeds? The answers to these questions may cause you to think twice.

Revisit your plan. Your financial plan can also provide important information for investment decision-making. Knowing, for example, the portfolio hurdle rate needed to fund your important life goals can be invaluable. You may find that it will be quite easy to achieve, so you can worry less about market pullbacks and won’t need to take an extraordinary amount of investment risk to get there.

Kick it around. You may want to seek opposing views to investment ideas you’re exploring. Many people process their thinking by speaking, so having a trusted sparring partner (or partners) to debate with can be a helpful way to expand your thinking. The more viewpoints, the better. This will add nuance to your ideas and help ensure you are thinking rationally. 

Successful tactics to address recency bias tend to have two complementary characteristics to help you make better decisions: They provide both additional perspective on a topic, and they slow down the decision-making process. 

While it is unlikely that Rotten Tomatoes is concerned about the influence of recency bias on its Top 100 Movies of All Time list, you might want to slow down and gather more information before your next movie night. 

Exploring other sources—like the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ list of past Oscar-nominated best pictures—can provide a much richer picture of quality films to spend your time on.

A lot of ways exist to help kids—grandchildren, nieces, nephews, godchildren, or any other young people in your life—build their financial muscles. Many of us utilize common practices like helping a child fill up a piggy bank over time, involving youngsters in small purchases using cash, helping them join the local bank or credit union to open an account, or by the different examples we set, such as sticking to a budget. 

But it’s also important to teach kids lessons in investing, says father of two and Wilmington-based CAPTRUST wealth management advisor Buck Beam. 

So, when it came time to pass on some of these lessons to his own two sons, Beau, 12, and Wayland, 9, Beam was “looking for a way for the kids to connect real money to the stock market and learn about how the stock market works,” he says. 

All the Action in Just a Fraction 

For the Beam family, it all started with the ubiquitous delivery trucks driving through their neighborhood, dropping off brown boxes adorned with a smile logo. “How about Amazon?” Beau and Wayland asked. There was just one problem: The boys’ stock pick was totally out of their budget, with a price tag in the thousands of dollars for a single share, says Beam. 

Then he looked into fractional shares. While buying entire shares of stock in big name companies can get expensive, Beam quickly discovered that fractional shares are a fantastic way to get young people excited about investing and to help them develop valuable financial skills that will be with them for life, without committing a lot of money. 

Since then, Beam has seen his two sons bloom into precocious investors. While working from home in the early days of the pandemic, the family even got into a routine of eating breakfast together while watching the business news, which led to the kids peppering their dad with questions about companies and how the stock market works. 

“The idea of investing some of their own money was thrilling to the boys,” Beam says. They already had some savings—from birthday money and allowances—and Beam was excited to foster their interest. He even upped the ante by pledging to match their investments dollar for dollar. 

A Long-Term Lesson 

“Fractional shares of stock are a great opportunity for young investors because it can teach kids how money actually grows,” says Beam. “And kids are eager to learn—particularly when Disney and Apple could be involved.” 

The idea is simple: Instead of buying whole shares of stock, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents—or anyone with a young person in his or her life—can buy partial shares by the dollar amount. Also called dollar-based investing, this capability was first offered by some technology startup companies and then introduced by companies like Fidelity and Charles Schwab in 2020. With dollar-based investing, even someone with just a little bit of money can buy in and diversify his or her small-dollar portfolio. 

“Investing in fractional shares is a neat activity to do with the kids,” says Beam, “and it has the long-term benefit of helping create savers and investors out of your kids and grandkids without putting a lot of money down.” According to Beam, fractional shares are for everyone—at the collective age of 21, his boys hold investments in Amazon, Microsoft, Roblox, Disney, and Apple. 

Hands-On Investing 

For Beam’s sons, their dad’s idea of investing in fractional shares meant they could afford to get into some of the brand-name stocks that they were familiar with. And that got their attention. The boys became very engaged and excited to talk with Beam about their personal stock holdings and their own investment ideas. 

Beam quickly noticed a stark difference from his previous attempts to educate his kids on the workings of the stock market. In the past, his lectures were largely ignored. But kids, like adults, absorb complex concepts much better through experiencing them than by passively listening. 

“A lot of kids don’t make financial decisions,” says Beam. “So it’s very interesting to them to have some skin in the game and then get to live with their decisions and see how it goes.” 

In fact, one day last winter, Beau watched a news report about the airline sector being hard hit by travel bans and pandemic restrictions. Since the sector was down, he pondered, wouldn’t it be a good time to buy some airline stocks and hold them until they recovered? Beam was delighted to encourage him to follow his instincts. “I said, ‘Maybe! For the amount of money we’re talking about, it’s worth a try.’” 

Beau invested $40 in an airline stock when the share price had dipped to the high $30s, getting a bit over one share’s worth. Since then, the stock has had ups and downs, trading above $50 at one point and back down to around $40. 

“Beau and Wayland have seen the markets go up and go down,” Beam says. “They’ve watched Amazon trade at its highest price ever and then come down significantly.” It’s a small amount of money that they’ve invested, but to them, he says, it’s a really big life lesson. 

Hungry for More 

When Beam comes home from work these days, Beau or Wayland will rush to him, asking, “What’s my stock worth now?” Father and sons pull up the Fidelity mobile app and put their heads together, checking on the latest progress of their investment portfolios. 

The experience has shown Beam how he can talk with his kids about the stock market. “This has been the first time in their lives they would ask me questions, instead of me just explaining what I do and why it matters. Now they’re curious. They want to understand. Once their money was on the line, they were hungry for more information,” says Beam. 

What to Do with Winnings 

Another important lesson for young investors is what to do with winnings. “When one of the stocks went up, their natural question was, ‘Can we get the money out and buy something?’” says Beam. 

While Beam and his wife, Caroline, have not allowed the boys to take any money out, they have been asked by the boys repeatedly. While we can’t blame the budding investors for fantasizing about cashing in, rightfully so, Beam has “encouraged them to look at this money as a long-term savings account, not a source of money for buying a toy or a treat or a video game.” 

Beam also wanted the boys to avoid short-term gains, which might have tax consequences. More importantly, he was teaching them to become savers and long-term investors—a habit that is truly a valuable gift to impart on a child.