Robert Brokamp

One other tidbit from the Schwab report, the second year of a presidential term is usually the weakest for the stock market.

Since 1928, the second year is profitable 54% of the time compared to an average of 67% for all four years with an average return of 3.3%.

For our next item, we'll continue on the theme of inflation with a recent MarketWatch article from Alicia Munel of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

According to Munel, prices have risen 25% in total over the past five years.

However, the three biggest items in most household budgets, housing, transportation, and food, have risen more.

Incomes, meanwhile, have risen 27%.

So while wages may have been keeping up with overall prices, Minal writes that, quote, standing still is not enough.

Most would like to see their standard of living improve over a five-year span.

Thus, they feel like they're falling behind.

End of quote.

And now the number of the week, which is 67.8.

That was the average age of death of Boeing employees who retired at age 65, whereas employees who retired at age 55 lived to 83.

In other words, retire sooner, live longer.

There's only one problem.

It's not true.

These stats come from a graphic that has been passed around the internet for a long time, including recently, but it was debunked more than 20 years ago.

Retirement expert Michael Finca recently wrote an article about it for the website ThinkAdvisor, and with the help of fellow researcher David Blanchett, looked at the actual relationship between retirement and life expectancy.

Using the University of Michigan's Health and Retirement Study, they looked at the retirement status of participants in 2012 and what percentage were still alive a decade later.

However, it's important to take health into account because many people retire sooner due to health issues, which can also result in them dying sooner.

So Finca and Blanchett also factored in the participants' self-assessed health status, which is actually a surprisingly good predictor of how long people will live.