After more than 15 years being on Facebook and rarely using it, in the last few months, I’ve fallen into the deplorable habit of scrolling through my feed every other day or even, gulp, once a day.
It’s amusing. My excuse is that I like to see if Barfield Financial has posted anything. But then of course I also scroll through MLB videos, other financial stuff and, well, how to say this? People doing stuff and failing. Failing by falling. Skateboard wipeouts, trampoline chaos, construction mishaps, that sort of thing,
It’s a little embarrassing that the Facebook algorithm has figured out, okay, this middle aged male likes financial information, interesting world facts, some light current events, some baseball and bicycling and . . . people falling on their faces. Often in a painful way. You are your algorithm, I suppose.
Anyway, Facebook confessions aside, in a recent scroll session I came upon two posts showing two versions of the same information – the earlier you retire, the longer you live.
Here’s the table from one of the posts:
Awesome! Pretty smart of me to take an early retirement from the government, right?
Well, hang on, this chart has no attribution, so . . . hmm. Is this for real? I don’t think so. The comment section of this post was, let us say, not favorable. I did get to see several entertaining memes and gifs.
To the contrary, the data on retirement and life expectancy seems to suggest the opposite. In other words, those that retire earlier die earlier. Oops.
.
To be sure, correlation does not equal causation, but retiring early as an indicator of early death makes some logical sense. As is pointed out, someone who retires early is likely to be someone who has poor health and/or became disabled. Or who couldn’t find a job and just quit looking. Neither scenario would contribute to a long life expectancy
Assuming for the sake of argument that living longer is a — and it seems that most people think it is — will retiring early extend my life in a meaningful way?
Well, there are a few lifetime predictor calculators out there. One of them is on the the Social Security Administration website. It is as basic as can be. You enter your birth date and, boom, your average life expectancy pops up. For a 54 year old guy like me, it is 82.5 years. That’s less than 30 years left. (Notably, if I were female instead of male, my expectancy would be 85.8 years.)
For a more comprehensive and probably more precise life expectancy calculator, I tried Northwestern Mutual’s version. This was kind of fun because you could see the years accumulate or decline in the age box based on your answers to questions about family history of heart disease, diet, exercise, and so forth. For example, toggle your response about smoking from “never smoked” to “2 packs a day” and you’ll lose at least 10 years before your eyes.
I ended up at 95 years.
I definitely like that result better than the SSA computation. I gained nearly 13 years! I can plan on 41 more years of life. So says Northwestern Mutual.
Although I think of the 95+ year-olds I have known and am not sure how I feel about being that old. Life is getting pretty limited at that point no matter how healthy you are. But that’s for another post.
To conclude, none of the calculators I checked out asked about retirement age. I think it is safe to say that retirement age, on its own, has far, far less to do with life expectancy than, say, access to quality health care. Or your diet and frequency of exercise.
That said, please check back with this website in 30-40 years (presumably using your cornea implanted quantum supercomputer that is accessing data centers on one of Jupiter’s moons) and see what happened.
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