Fred Hall (age 111) lives nearby. Each morning he reads the local paper and
does his routine exercises. Mr. Hall is a retiree of the railway mail service;
he worked there forty-six years ago. A coworker of mine visits her 104-year-
old grandmother, who has a grandchild with grandchildren. These people
are among the seventy thousand centenarians in the United States. Will we
live fifty to sixty years longer than we are planning for? Will we survive
longer than our income does?
In Life Extension Planning, Susan K. Bradley writes, “Not long ago, I
had felt I was doing a good job helping my clients prepare for retirement.
Then one day, I saw a small article on the inside page of USA Today: Sci-
entists had determined that humans can live to be 140—two decades past
the previous longevity mark of 120” (Journal of Financial Planning, Janu-
ary 2001, p. 38). Because estimating longevity is an essential part of plan-
ning for retirement, an underestimation will cause people to save too little,
retire too early, and spend too much. If you don’t have a realistic estimate
of personal longevity, how can you know whether you have the right retire-
ment plan?
To further complicate matters, many people are expecting to retire ear-
lier than the historical norm. In 2001, an EBRI News survey found that “one
in three workers expected to be retired less than 20 years” (Journal of
Financial Planning, March 2001, p. 120). But in 1990 the U.S. Census
Bureau estimated that when leading-edge baby boomers begin turning 100,
more than 834,000 citizens might already be centenarians, adding, “And,
if we see even more rapid increases in life expectancy, as assumed in the
highest series, the future number of centenarians could be substantially
higher.”
