While you want to live a long and healthy life, you might not want to live too long. That’s because you’ll need to have saved enough money to take care of yourself until the end of your life.
One of the primary issues is many people adhere to a retirement model that is based on a much shorter life span. As a result, they fail to consider that their retirement could last three decades or more. As a result, they don’t plan on how they’ll pay for that.
Roughly 25% of 65-year-olds today will live past age 90, and one out of 10 will live past age 95, according to the Social Security Administration. With that in mind, you should use the agency’s life expectancy calculator to get a rough estimate of how long you (and your spouse) may live.
Fidelity Investments recently wrote in a blog that 50 years ago, most Americans shared a common view of retirement. You left the 9-to-5 job and transitioned into your ‘golden years,’ which was a period of about 10 to 15 years to live off your pension plan and enjoy life. However, now it’s hard to say what retirement is. For some, it can be 30 years or more.
With longer lives, it’s critical that we take a second look at our visions of retirement.
Many individuals aren’t able to save enough in 40 years of working, to support themselves for 30 or more years of not working.
Healthy retirees typically have much lower monthly medical expenses than those with serious conditions like diabetes or cancer. However, their longer life expectancies mean that they actually need to save a lot more to pay their health care costs in retirement.
One recent study found that those people with long life expectancies must save more than they might expect to cover health care costs in retirement.
The wisest action is: save as much as you possibly can in anticipation of a long life.
Reference: The Washington Post (April 9, 2018) “Your long life could be the death of your retirement savings”
Kyle Robbins
Kyle Robbins is the founder and sole owner of The Law
Offices of Kyle Robbins. He received his J.D. with honors from the University of Texas School of Law and his B.S. in Food Chemistry and Microbiology from Oklahoma State University.
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