We cannot insure against everything. We obviously cannot insure against the number-one cause of death, namely, mortality.
I recommend to people that they decide what is the major fear in their lives. This is especially important with respect to long-term investing. If you are not clear about what the major threat to you is, then you will not take effective steps to forestall it.
There are always trade-offs in life. If you take steps to forestall one threat, you are lowering your guard against some other threat. We have limited resources. When we allocate resources to deal with one kind of threat, we cannot use these resources to defend against another kind of threat.
Husbands and wives should sit down and discuss what the major threats are that bother them most. This is a joint effort. The two of them should work out a plan that will enable them to reduce the likelihood of the three or four major threats that concern them. If these are the same threats, this makes some of their planning a lot easier.
My greatest fear has always been the same: Alzheimer's disease. The diseases that can kill me, for which there are at least some known defenses, will inevitably fail to kill me if something else gets me. I think we have to take this attitude toward all of our long-term efforts. If we do not, we will waste a lot of time, energy, and emotion in hedging against that which is inevitable.
We all know this, so I am saying nothing new. But sometimes we need emotional reminders of what we know to be true if we are going to make effective use of whatever time we have left.
The reason I fear Alzheimer's disease is because it incapacitates the living. It converts the survivors into liabilities to their families or to the state. I do not think most productive people want to become liabilities to anybody else.
Alzheimer's seems to be irreversible. It may not be, but it has the experts baffled. A recent article appeared in a British publication that announced good news: if you stay active mentally, you reduce the likelihood of getting dementia. But, when I read the text, the news was only marginally good. People who remain mentally active slowed the rate of decline by about 15%. That means that 85% of the decline continued. Something is better than nothing, but this is only marginally better than nothing.
You always know that a medical condition is beyond hope when you read something like this:
Dr James Pickett, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society, added: "More research and bigger studies are needed, but in the meantime reading more and doing crosswords can be enjoyable and certainly won't do you any harm."The best way to reduce your risk of developing dementia is to eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly and maintain a healthy weight."
Let me translate this for you. First, "Send me more money." When somebody who is director of research for anything tells you that what is needed is more research, this is the barber telling you that you need a haircut.
Second, "We have no idea what is causing this, so we recommend the standard cure for everything, for which we also have little evidence." They do not tell us what a balanced diet is. They offer no supporting evidence for what a balanced diet is. Their theories of how much weight we should maintain are contradictory. As to what exercise is best, they cannot say with any degree of precision. But, nevertheless, we are supposed to eat right, not gain too much weight, but not lose too much weight, and move around vigorously, at least once in a while. This reminds me of the various cures to bubonic plague that were offered in 1348. The big one was to sit in a room with a fire in the fireplace in summer. They had no idea what caused the disease. Nothing they did cured it. The same was true of yellow fever prior to the discovery of the connection between mosquitoes and the disease.
What I would like to see is evidence that specialized nonprofit organizations that raise money to cure diseases are ever the source of the cure of these diseases. What is the evidence that giving any money to a large anti-cancer organization has led to discovery of a cancer cure by that organization? I do not think there is much evidence for any such cure, ever. The cures always come from outside the nonprofit organizations that are trying to raise money. Maybe a profit-seeking pharmaceutical company discovers something. Maybe a long-known herbal cure is finally recognized as being more effective than chemotherapy. Maybe the World Wide Web lets people find some alternative therapy that works. But what we do not find often is that the hundreds of millions of dollars donated to some large fundraising organization that is devoted to finding a cure of this or that, have ever led to the discovery of a cure.
To reduce the likelihood of my getting Alzheimer's, I take pills with curcumin in them. I also take vitamin D. To understand why, click here. How much confidence do I place in these preventative measures? Not much. But both of them are inexpensive. So, when something is cheap and easy, and may conceivably reduce the threat of the thing that I am most concerned about, I am willing to spend a little money to adopt the cure. If it involved major lifestyle changes, I probably would not do it. But spending a few cents for some pills seems like a reasonable expenditure.
Both of my grandmothers suffered from forms of dementia, but this was late in their lives. It took a serious fall and a broken hip to produce this in one of my grandmothers, and she did not live long after the affliction came upon her. My other grandmother was heavily drugged, and I suspect this was part of her problem. My mother has no short-term memory, but this has come upon her only in the last four years. She will be 96 in December. So, old age remains a threat. But there is only one known cure for old age, and most people do not want to take it.
I recommend that people give considerable thought to which of the afflictions of old age they should prepare for and seek to avoid. It is not a good idea to wait until after you are retired to begin thinking about these particular afflictions. It is better to plan ahead.
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