“I think most women are just more in tune with longevity than men are and maybe are concerned about it,” Vernon says. Another is that women are aware they live longer than men and that wives often outlive their husbands. One hypothesis is that women are traditionally more involved in caregiving for older relatives and thus better acquainted with the realities of aging, he says. Researchers aren’t sure why more women than men demonstrated longevity literacy, Kolluri says. But 31% of men selected the answer that underestimated life expectancy by six years, compared to 19% of women. Men and women were about equally likely to say they didn’t know the correct answer or choose the answer that overestimated life expectancy by six years. Men were asked “What is life expectancy among 60-year-old men in the U.S.?” Women were asked “What is life expectancy among 60-year-old women in the U.S.?” (The correct answers were determined by Social Security actuarial data from 2019.) Last year, the researchers added a longevity question with a multiple-choice answer. The annual survey, known as the Personal Finance Index, has traditionally measured financial literacy. More than half of Americans don’t understand how long people tend to live in retirement, according to a 2022 survey of more than 3,500 adults nationwide by the TIAA Institute and the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center at the George Washington University School of Business. Understanding and addressing that risk is an important element of retirement planning, but most Americans are falling short, says Surya Kolluri, head of the TIAA Institute, which conducts research on financial security. With longer lives comes “longevity risk”: the chance that people will outlive their savings. There’s a 50% chance that at least one member of a heterosexual married couple age 65 will be alive at 92. One out of three men and one in two women in their mid-50s will live to 90, the Society of Actuaries reports. The longer you live, the longer you are likely to live. The thing about longevity is that it’s persistent. That figure includes infant mortality as well as the accidents, diseases, overdoses, homicides and suicides that end lives too early. But the number the CDC cited – 76.4 years – is life expectancy from birth. life expectancy dropped for the second year in a row. The life expectancy statistics that often make headlines aren’t the ones that matter for retirement planning, Vernon says.įor example, in December the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that U.S. “It’s often in their late 70s and 80s that they started to struggle.” What you need to know “A lot of people do OK in their first 10 years or 15 years of retirement,” says actuary Steve Vernon, a former research scholar at the Stanford Center on Longevity. That could leave him – and the spouse who may outlive him – with too little income later on. Men also were far more likely than women to underestimate life expectancy – and that’s a huge potential problem for both sexes.Ī man who expects to die in his 70s might draw too much from retirement funds or start Social Security too early. (The right answer was 85.) Only 32% of men chose the correct answer for the life expectancy for 60-year-old men, which was 82. In a recent TIAA Institute study, 43% of women correctly estimated the life expectancy of 60-year-old women in the U.S. Underestimate it and you could run short of money. Overestimate your longevity, and you could retire too late or scrimp too much. Longevity literacy is essential to smart retirement planning. One area where we seem to do better is “longevity literacy,” or understanding how long we’re likely to live. Women often don’t score as well as men in surveys of financial literacy.
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