What to Expect When You're...Aging

The only thing that everyone on the face of the earth is always doing is aging!

We're awfully good at it, as evidenced by life expectancies. A baby born today in the United States has a life expectancy of 78.0 years. In 1900, this figure was 54.9 years. Here's where the comparison of the two statistics gets interesting. In fact, while accurate, these statistics are also misleading. That's because, in 1900 the statistics were skewed by high infant mortality. To illustrate this, if one baby lived less than one year, and two others lived to age 90, the average life expectancy for that group would only be 30 years. In fact, at the turn of the century, 10% of infants died before their first birthday . So, it's not that most people dropped dead on or about age 55; many lived much longer. In fact, on average, we can calculate that those people who survived infancy lived approximately 10 years longer than the life expectancy of 55.

We are not only living longer, many of us are living with conditions that years ago would have killed us. Instead, due to our ability to manage disease, these conditions are chronic, and in fact may not be what eventually kills us. Kidney disease and COPD are just two examples. Future medical advances are likely to only exaggerate this phenomenon.

Building upon these facts, isn't it logical that long term care planning is becoming more and more important? Each generation might be more likely to need extended long term care.

Here's another way of looking at it:

Financial planning and retirement scenarios typically project lifespans of 85, 90 or even 100 years. If we believe it's important to run financial scenarios showing us living that long, it's because we believe that we may live that long. If we in fact do live that long, isn't it reasonable to imagine that we may need help?

When was the last time that you saw a 90 or 100-year-old in the grocery stores? At the movies? Driving down the road? Not usually, and for what I think is an obvious reason: their mobility and ability to do what they once took for granted is limited.

Almost everyone says that it's smart to have a will, and perhaps even a trust and a prepaid burial plot. It only makes sense to add long term care planning to the list.