What does the future hold?

If we live longer and healthier it changes plans for Financial Planners, for Aged Care Experts, and for you.

For Financial Planners

Imagine the CV of a 90 year old who had all the hormones and energy of a thirty-something?

If the medical revolution increases our lifespans faster than expected, it will affect retirement, superannuation, mortality tables, inheritances, wills, health care, and pensions.

Consider the implications. Current annuity tables don’t allow for medical advances. Even the most optimistic projections only assume that medicine will improve at the same rate it has in the last 25 years. If we outdo that, even the most optimistic projections around today will underestimate lifespan. In turn that forces demographic changes that mean populations will be larger than expected, the retirement age will then probably have to rise, and/or superannuation will.
Instead workers will part-retire, and work 2 days a week instead of full time. They’re not ‘saving for the future’, just preserving their current wealth. In the US people are already returning to work long after they’ve retired. Robbie Eisenberg was still a consultant at over 100.

Imagine retiring for 100 years?

For the Aged Care Industry

Long before we discover the fountain of youth, there will be major changes in Aged Care. Extending lives does not mean extending years in nursing homes. Clinical trials have already begun using gene therapy to prevent age related memory loss. Dementia is not inevitable. accommodation, leisure, employment and health-care.

If people get the body of a thirty-something, Bowls and Bingo will not be enough

As we begin to forestall the degenerative conditions of aging, people will stay independent longer. This will change the accommodation we need, the way we spend our leisure time, and how long we work for, and how we spend our finances.

For You Personally – What Can You do to Live Longer?

I don’t want to live to 100

Lots of people say this, but few of them are 99. Being old becomes a different proposition if you have your health and energy.

People may find it easy to choose not to use a medical treatment to increase their lifespans, but would many people knock back a cure for cancer, a treatment for arthritis, a vaccine for alzheimers?

If you want to live long, if you have big plans, from now on, every year counts. The longer you stay alive the more you increase your chances of living longer. There’s an amplification factor. Every year new medical advances potentially add to your life expectancy. So the name of the game is delaying degenerative diseases. If you have to get lung cancer, best do it the year after they find the cure.

For The Planet

There are too many people already

Quite possibly. Another reason to start planning, pondering and discussing the implications.  Even more reason to reduce our footprint, to be more efficient, to avoid waste. Notice though, as lifespan and healthspan increase in most countries the growth rate of the population slows.  Women in Russia, Spain and Italy now have less than 1.2 children each. The next generation is almost half the size of the one before. As Mark Steyn so aptly points out, years from now children of these children will have no aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces or nephews. So much for the large extended family…