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Living longer than you think

Study shows many underestimate their longevity
In 2012, Allene Pera, 97, right, laughed with her friend Adeline Becay, 90, during an ice cream social at Sunshine Gardens in Durango. The pair said living an active life contributed to their longevity. A new study shows people who gave themselves good odds of living to 75 were more likely to live that long.

Do you think you’ll make it to 75? That was the question that the massive Health and Retirement Survey posed to 26,000 Americans older than 50 in 1992.

Specifically, the researchers asked respondents to guess their odds of living to age 75: 10 percent? 50 percent? 100? Now, nearly 25 years later, researchers can evaluate how well the respondents did at guessing their chances of living that long – simply by counting how many of those people actually made it to 75.

In general, people wildly underestimated their chances of reaching 75. Seven percent of respondents said there was simply no way they’d live to 75 – they gave themselves a zero percent chance of living that long.

But in fact, nearly half of this group lived to 75 – or longer.

Among people who gave themselves 50-50 odds, 75 percent saw their 75th birthday.

These numbers come from a fascinating new Brookings Institution study about longevity and retirement planning.

You’ll notice that there is a bit of a relationship between how long people thought they’d live and how long they actually lived – people who gave themselves better odds of living to 75 were indeed more likely to live that long.

But what the Brookings researchers note, with some degree of alarm, is the big gap in most cohorts between their expected and actual lifespans.

“Individuals do not fully understand the longevity risk they face,” write authors Benjamin Harris and Katharine G. Abraham.

As a society, we are somewhat obsessed with the risks of dying – from car crashes, cancer, terrorists, Ebola or any of the thousands of mortal terrors that haunt our nightly newscasts. But we’re less accustomed to considering the risks of living long – of outliving our retirement savings.

With lifespans increasing and Social Security on shaky financial footing going forward, people are going to be depending more on their personal savings and retirement accounts to support them through old age.

In order to assess how much money we’ll actually need, we first need to have a realistic sense of how long we’ll live. The Brookings study suggests that many of us still have some work to do on that front.



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