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Are you one who will live to age 90?
Getting off the couch will help you get there.
There are 43 million people age 65+ in the US. (Remember when it was 39 million, back in 2012?) Today there are many reasons for older adults to get up and get moving. Seniors are saddled with ever-lengthening life expectancies (one in four of today's 65-year-olds will live to 90! They are stuck in their awkward and costly houses, with questionable health status and a propensity to be overweight. Meanwhile, more than half of those aged 65+ rely on Social Security -- with its average payment of $1294/month -- for more than half of their income.
E-commerce in estate planning
Perhaps you or someone you know has started an e-commerce website to sell finished products or homemade crafts. Etsy.com is a premier website for selling arts and crafts online -- creating a virtual, global marketplace for artisans who previously spent their weekends at craft fairs and festivals. This one website alone hosts more than a million active shops, making it easy for crafters to sell their wares without having to create their own website.6
Other e-commerce resources, such as Weebly, Squarespace, Shopify and Bigcommerce, enable regular folks to create an individual e-tail site by using an automatic Web builder.
But what happens to small e-commerce sites -- not to mention their revenues -- when the owner passes away? Orders stop being received and fulfilled. Customers go away. Some relative discovers a monthly website hosting charge on the deceased owner's credit card statement and cancels the service. Many times, the website isn't even disabled, joining scads of abandoned businesses that create a virtual black hole in Web space.7
Many smaller e-tail shopkeepers don't think about including their side business in their estate plan. For some, this could be a costly oversight -- especially if the revenue it generates could become a source of necessary income.