I just checked my time on the death clock. I don’t like my number. I… seriously need to make some changes…
I’ve done my retirement planning based on the idea that I would like there to be only a 20% chance of outliving my retirement: Look at the life tables for how many people will be alive at retirement age, multiply that times .2 and see what age that corresponds to…about 90. Not bad…
Uh, my numbers say I won’t… Make it to retirement… So should I save money?
My age suggests that I never will either, no matter how long I live.
I want to like… But in a commiserative way… I’ll like, but leave the explanation.
Memento mori.
These numbers are an average for the US, which means that if you are male they will almost certainly be wrong.
Education, job, skin colour and location have an effect. There’s one line on the NY metro where life expectancy steadily increases as you move closer to Manhattan, with something like a change in the average of 8 years. The same applies to London. Outside cities, the average male life expectancy in our area (the hinterland of Bath, UK) is around 80 years. Although I might die tomorrow of random factors, the assessment I had done to determine my best approach to my pension gave me a 50% chance of reaching 90. My father is 92, and still living independently, so I don’t rule it out. Global warming or war are probably the main risk factors.
Medical advances can also suddenly change life expectancy. It is quite probable that by 2030 Alzheimers, breast cancer and influenza will not affect the developed world.
Bottom line? Don’t make any decisions based on over simplified statistics.
It would be good to add some more factors. Honestly, I feel a little bit better whenever I see men do this or other kinds of risky activity:
I’m probably not going to die in that way, and it all helps to explain some of the gender difference in the mortality rate.
Not to mention that the current capitalism-friendly biomedical research conditions massively favor rich-people ailments (because, you know, it pays better) so your first point is reinforced.
I’m mid 30’s and at the rate we are going my retirement will be when I die.
It’s run for over 5 minutes now, and the probability of living 50 or more years is still stuck at 0%. Meanwhile, 0-9 years keeps toggling between 10-11%. Time to drink the good whiskey!
Life’s too short for bad whiskey.
“Retirement”. Like that’s a real thing.
It’s the carrot dangled in front of us, in the same distance regardless how far we go.
I can’t seem to delete or edit this post, but yes, of course it’s talking about years from now, not age. However, this does mean that I am almost invincible until I reach my mid-50s.
I always just find these kinds of things “cute” and move on. Like a fortune cookie.
My death clock seems to agree with the flowing data chart – I guess that I am quite average…
It depends on where you are prepared to live and what standard of living you expect. One problem for people in the US is that life is extremely expensive in world terms, so very large savings are needed to pay for retirement.
Back in the late 1990s I knew a guy who had been planning for years to retire to Thailand. To a village. On an island. He spent his holiday allowance there every year, had learned the language, and the headman had invited him to retire there and run the village clinic. People thought he was joking…till he reached 60, sold his house and disappeared. He was still around years later but had decided that it was too much bother to visit the mainland to use the Internet.
Less extreme cases are the people who retire to Spain or Portugal where the cost of living is much lower than in Germany or Britain.
Are you prepared to change your social life and your way of living completely?
[edit - I retired in my early 60s, but the caveat is that my wife and I spent well below the norm for our income group from the date our children left home. That’s the other option; are you prepared to live in a smaller house, drive smaller cars, not try and compete with the neighbours on exotic holidays? Because my experience of the US is that many Americans do not save enough. Nor do enough Brits, but at least we pay substantial taxes into our welfare system, till your government tries to use TTIP to prevent us.]
Given the current slate of political candidates in the US, your being trapped in a M. Night Shyamalan remix is preferential to this being the real state of affairs.
