2012-10-04-Older Veterans
Seminars@Hadley
Older Blinded Veterans and the Future
Presented by
Urban Miyares
Moderated by
Larry Muffet
October 4, 2012
Larry Muffet
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffet. I’m a member of Hadley’s seminars team and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is older blinded veterans and the future. Your presenter is a familiar one, Urban Miyares. Urban is a nationally known and renounced speaker, entrepreneur, sportsman and veterans advocate. Urban has done many seminars at Hadley and has a major role in our veteran’s initiative and in our Forsyth Center for Entrepreneurship. It’s an absolute delight. It’s one of the fringe benefits of my job here that I get to do these seminars with Urban. And today he is going to discuss preparing for your financial future. I know as a baby boomer and a veteran I’m going to be taking notes over here to the side while he gives his presentation today. So without any further adieu I’m going to turn the microphone over to Urban and let’s get started.
Urban Miyares
Great to be with you, Larry, again and for all of you out there blinded veterans, I hope you’re out there. We’re going to cover an interesting topic that I’ve done in a few seminars, short seminars with ten or 20 veterans around and that is what is the future for us who have sight loss who are veterans. How can we handle our personal affairs, our matters, our financial affairs and insure that we’re going to be around. I’m talking mainly for veterans. They say the adult workers, anybody 40 or over and myself as a baby boomer, I’m 65 now having served during the Vietnam era in ’67/68. I’m sort ’67 and ’68 in Vietnam. And of course being a blinded veteran it’s interesting how we have to put our affairs— I know in my earlier years I used to have financial planners come and they had this format or program they used to come to me with and saying “We have to prepare for this. We have to prepare for that, those later years in life.” And I said it doesn’t qualify for me. I’m a blinded veteran. I can get this from the VA or this has been accommodated for and so forth.
Many financial planners that I’ve known over the years—and I’ve done workshops for financial planners on how to better help veterans whether you’re blinded or not on planning their financial affairs for the future and especially those years that call “retirement” years. Retirement is something that’s a foreign word for me. People say I’m still in denial factor but to me retirement means you stop everything and you change a lifestyle. In a way it might be wait to die and all or do something else that’s more relaxing. It changes our routine which can be a cause for us to possibly die and earlier death than we should. One of the things I remember specifically going through the blind rehabilitation center—WBRC—was the psychologist came in there and a positive word he said about being blind is “You’ll probably live longer because you won’t be driving motorcycles, driving cars. Just based on statistical evidence you’re probably going to live four or five, maybe even seven years longer than you would have if you had your sight.”
It’s an irony in a way to put it that way but the fact is we are living longer, especially us blinded veterans. Mainly due to healthcare, our medical treatment if we’re service connected veterans specifically. We’re getting healthcare as often as we may need it or request it in most instances from your local veterans’ administration in the hospital, medical center. We’re going to be talking today not only about service connected veterans whether you’re service connected for blindness or not but non service connected veterans. Those who are not receiving compensation for the department of veterans’ affairs. Maybe you’re receiving compensation being retired, as an example. You served your 20 or 30 years in the military and got out with retirement and then started losing your sight or lost your vision after military service and not related to military service.
We’re going to talk the whole gamut of that whole realm of blindness and having been in the military. Again, whether service or not service connected. And of course at Hadley this will be on the archives and if you find it of specific value to someone you know, a fellow blinded veteran or a spouse or a loved one of a blinded veteran, please have them tune into Seminars@Hadley and listen to this broadcast again because we probably will be covering some topics that will surely interest them. Also I wanted to make a little applauded for Hadley on the blinded veterans initiative there is a wonderful presentation by Peter Link, written by Peter Link of the Blinded Veterans Association, on benefits you’re entitled to both service connected and non service connected with the veterans administration. This is something that you should definitely take a look at. Listen to the broadcast on it to go over these issues. You may think you know quite a bit but Peter does a wonderful job of giving us the latest information on what you’re entitled to, what benefits you could be receiving being a blinded veteran. And it’s specifically slanted to being a blinded veteran.
Again, please take the time to listen to it and if you listen to it once you’ll be surprised. You listen to it a second time you’ll pick up something you didn’t hear the first time you went through the program. Let’s talk about the future with blindness as a veteran and how you plan for the future. One of the things that you may have to decide right away is that you’re going to have to change your attitude and all because how we plan for the future is basically based around our personality and our personality type will often dictate how we think. Now as we get older our personality changes. We have a lot of assets or benefits to maturity and that is we’ve lived life for a number of years and we should know more than we do today. We should know more today than we did when we were 20 years of age, as an example, just due to that life experience. This maturity of this different way of thinking or how we assess or come up to decisions. It really changes as we get older. I hope for the better. I know in my case, I’ve often said if I knew as much at 20 years of age as I know today I’d really be dangerous. But it’s an issue going on.
The first thing for you to do is evaluate yourself regardless of your health. If you have other medical conditions, whatever the prognosis is, maybe you’ve got cancer. Maybe you have multiple sclerosis. Maybe you have diabetes or some other medical condition. It could be a spinal cord injury, a traumatic brain injury. These are areas that have to be included in your future planning and so forth. When I came back from Vietnam in 1968 they said I had, at best, 20 years left to live. Thank goodness for medical care and treatment and new types of drugs that are out there today, I’m still around. And actually I’m healthier today than I was in 1968. Sure I have more medical conditions. That comes with aging but they’re all manageable and under control. Physically I feel so much better than I did many years ago and that’s probably because of the attitude I took at 21 years of age when I said that if I had 20 years to live, my wife and I both agreed we’re going to live one day at a time. So we never really planned for me to live this long.
We’re not one that looked on retirement or some kind of program that would add to our VA benefits so that in our retirement years, they say golden years, we would go—matter of fact, I was talking to one vet that I know and he said “You know those golden years. I’ve got plenty of gold but I’m too sick now to spend it, too old and too sick.” I guess golden years are defined differently also. The attitude that you take is one to look at in your future. Let’s say if you’re 60, 70 or even 80 or 90 years of age right now, the chances are that you probably will live a lot longer or you’re surprised you’re alive today given your medical condition like I am. I’m still surprised. I wake up every morning just excited for the day because as they say I’m above the grass now and I want to keep it that way as long as I can in that area.
So areas we’re going to cover are relationships, a little bit of financial. I’m not a financial planner. I’m not an accountant. I’m not an attorney. I’m just talking about attitudes and how you look at the future so that the remaining years are as fruitful as you want them to be and meet your expectations. We talked about personality briefly and we go through a cycle in our lives of personality. When we’re born we’re drivers. We’re crying “I want my milk. I want to eat. I want to eat.” Then around one and a half, two years of age we get into that sense of—start learning how to talk and all. We get that expressive “Why? Why? Why?” We ask and all. Then from there we get a little bit older and then all of a sudden we’re quiet and people wonder if we’re sick or something like that. We just want to be everybody’s friend. We smile wherever we go and then they send us to school and we become analytical and the cycle continues throughout our life.
Sometimes we stick at one of those personality traits for a long time. Sometimes many years. Some people never get out of that personality trait. We’re constantly going from that driver status into that expressive status, into that amiable status and then into that analytical status. By the way, we cover these profiles in Hadley’s programs on entrepreneurship because that’s critical knowing what your personality style is to determine if you even should or want to go into a business or what type of business would be best is based more on your personality then it is on your desire for a specific type of business. Anyway, going back to being a veteran where you are and let’s say you’re analytical or you’re an amiable person. By trait you’re a long term planner. You want to know you’re planning for years ahead. So when you were in the analytical stage in your early years, 20s, 30s, whether you were sighted then or not you were already planning for “When I’m 60, when I’m 70, when I turn that golden 65 age marker how much money will I have?” You plan that appropriately.
Sometimes you go to a financial planner. Sometimes you invest in a stock market or mutual funds or with your banker, going through these secure long term things with the belief if “I receive this interest rate” and so forth, well we know what happened with that in the last ten or so years with the stock market and the current recession we’re in and with what savings accounts are paying right now. If you’re planning that the government will always be there, that can change too. The government can giveth and they can taketh away. And every time they give us something guarantee they’re going to take something away. We just don’t get something for nothing. And you may say “I don’t have to worry about that. I’m a service connected veteran for blindness or for something else and I’ll always be getting this monthly check.” Well, I as well as you sure hope that happens. We can never guarantee everything. We have to be prepared for what happens. What happens if social security goes broke is an example. I know many of you out there would be devastated if that happened right now. Whether you’re receiving SSDI or SSI or you’re on full retirement.
Every political year you always hear about the social security system and how much it costs the country and not enough workers. You’ve got to realize, for those of us that are in the baby boomer age, we’re quickly approaching the time in history, the first time in American history where people 60 years of age or older will outnumber those under that 60 years of age. It’s kind of scary because the working class, which would be under 60, under 50 in a lot of cases had to contribute to this fund for their own benefit, let alone continuing paying for us. When actuary first started these numbers on social security, they didn’t expect us to live this long. It didn’t happen back then. It was unbelievable people would be living 80 and 90. Already we have more people over 100 years of age in America than in history. The numbers are going to grow and hopefully you’ll join me and be over 100 years of age in the coming year. This is something that’s going to happen.
I don’t want to be the clouds over our head type of Chicken Little thing that we’re so pessimistic about it but these are things that we have to be prepared for. Of course as I’m talking we’re thinking about us living and what I’m going to cover, I’m talking about today, tomorrow and then we’re no longer here. Yes, I’m talking about death and after we die what’s going to happen. Now some of us who are analytical, as I said before, are planning and planning to build our wealth, our income to such a level that if we die before we plan to die someone else is going to enjoy it and some of you I’m sure are like that. You want it for your children and your grandchildren and your heirs. Some are planning that “If I do live longer at least I’ll have the money plus the veterans administration benefits or my retirement from the military plus my social security and I’m living good.”
Right now everything looks great because no matter what’s happening in a recession you’re going to get that check every month or checks coming in every month. And if you’ve also been in a workplace whether you were blinded at the time or not, and you drew a retirement it looks pretty good right now for you. Especially when others are losing their jobs and all and here you are with a nice bank roll to say whether it’s investments, it’s real estate or something else that you’re doing. It’s all find and good but if your life for some reason should cut short what’s going to happen? Now there are many service connected veterans out there who are broke. Maybe in the recent foreclosure rate their home went into foreclosure. Maybe they’re broke due to a medical condition that the VA would not cover for some reason. It might not be them directly but a loved one, a spouse or family member that doesn’t qualify under tri-care or VA comp for a spouses type of program. And they had to pay out of their pocket to help a child or a loved one, a family member go and for that reason their monthly check that comes in is all they have left.