“How long will you live? It’s an increasingly important question to consider, especially for retirement investors. Researchers made waves in the news last week by arguing that “72 is the new 30” when it comes to longevity.
A great headline for the Internet, to be sure. What they meant by that is not that a given 72-year-old should feel and act 30, although some obviously do, but that life expectancy—that is, your odds of dying today for any reason—are about the same as they were for a 30-year-old early human.
Cleaner water, better drugs and vaccines, a high-quality food supply, all of these trends factor into our ability to outlive the hunter-gatherers of thousands of years ago, if somehow you could stack a modern human up against a human of those times.
It’s a bit of a statistical trick, that headline. People die at 72 pretty easily from all the typical problems of old age, and they die earlier and later than that age, of course.
But let’s get down to the facts of the matter, apples-to-apples: If you make it to 65, the “traditional” retirement age, what are your chances of living longer?
Pretty good, it turns out. Here you find another interesting quirk of the numbers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts the average American’s life expectancy at 78.7 years.
Not much more than 72, right? But that’s taking into account people of all ages, including those who die at birth, get killed in auto accidents, contract diseases as young adults, and so on.
However, if you make it to 65 (and who says you won’t?) you can expect to live another 19.2 years, according to the CDC. That puts your life expectancy to about 84.
If you live to see 75, you could last another 12.2 years, the agency calculates. That’s 87 years of living. Added up, your retirement money at 65 is going to have to last, potentially, another 22 years!
This fact illustrates what longevity scientists mean when they say that a modern human at 72 is at the same risk of death as a “young” caveman millennia ago. It can be a rough existence, sure, but your chances of sticking around aren’t that bad….”
If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on Twitter
