The Retirement Reality That No One Tells You.
Last year, I attended a week-long retirement course provided by my employer, it was fantastic as the speakers were financial, Lawyers Pension experts etc. On the last day, it was the doctors turn to speak and it was interesting.
My biggest take away and surprise from the week other than saving more was your health. The bottom line is we are all going to live longer. Right now the average age of men and women is 78.5 years. Women live longer than men if you didn’t already know that on an average of 8 years longer.
My wife’s great aunt just celebrated her 100th year birthday… amazing! At 14 this woman worked for the Polish underground during world war II. Good genetics? absolutely, but you can see that we’re getting to a critical point in this generation where we are should expect to live longer (maybe not 100) but certainly longer than we have in the past.
What no one tells you is that because of science and technological advances each year advances are made 10x more than the previous year. More discoveries because of better science and technology that are now impacting how quickly things that were once problems are now being resolved.
I had a friend that sadly passed away a year ago to cancer, she was diagnosed as terminal, 7 years prior to her passing she was given 18 months to live, she lived another 7 years. She told me that the longer she was around the better chance she had of getting rid of it because they were discovering new treatments every day. Sadly she’s gone now, but she fought like a warrior. She is my superhero.
Technology is interesting because what it is doing for the medical community is pulling information faster than doctors could ever get it in the past. Deep Blue the famous supercomputer that beat Kasparov at chess is still around and making huge advancements in the speed at which medical problems can be solved. Deep Blue is currently in a hospital in South Carolina and what Deep Blue is doing is amazing. Medical papers are published every day around the world by researchers, scientists, and doctors on various medical findings.
The problem for doctors and surgeons is, a solution may have been found, but because over 3000 medical papers are released each day, how in the world could any doctor working with a specific ailment find the time to research what a scientist found or solved in Norway.
Welcome Deep Blue, the IBM computer can search volumes of information in seconds when it took years in the past, as a result, the time to find a solution is exponentially quicker and it will get faster as technology gets smaller and faster every day.
Cloning is another field that is showing great promise and the medical upside to cloning is incredible. If you need a kidney clone it if you need a liver to clone it. We know they can already clone sheep and other animals its just a matter of time before they are doing specific body parts.
3D printing is already a reality in the operating room, we’ve already seen examples of doctors 3D printing heart valves and more. These advances and applications will presumably extend our current lifespan.
Where does this take us? Most of us with good health, good luck and good medical care can expect to live much longer.
In terms of retirement planning, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe we will live to 100, Certainly, the doctor who spoke to us that particular session thought so.
Make More Money
If your planning on retiring at 60 you need to have the funds to live for another 40 years!!!! Its crazy but it will be the reality. Once it was thought if you could get a good 15 years healthy after retirement you did well now you have to consider tripling that timeline.
With the help of Science and Technology you will hopefully be healthy during those 40 years, so you need to consider what you are going to do, travel more, work more (when I say work I mean doing something fun), volunteer you’ll need to keep busy.
Refer to the Make Money section and Save Money section on this site for ideas and we’ll continue to explore ways to be prepared and keep ourselves busy for those 40 years of retirement.
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