Will Health Extension Make Retirement Savings Unnecessary?

A continuing flow of promising research on aging points to a growing likelihood that healthy life spans will soon get a significant boost. It is also possible that initial progress in extending “health spans” by a few years will unfold further into “longevity escape velocity” – where remaining life span gets increased by more than 1 year per year.

While this potential is exciting, it also comes with many implications – such as to “How will I be able to afford living to 110+?” to “How long until these therapies are available and what will they cost?” and “What will happen to pension plans (like Social Security) who promise lifetime income?”

This latter topic formed the subject matter for an article that I co-authored with LEAF’s Nick Bagala in https://www.lifespan.io In that article, I want to revisit one statement;

…the fundamental reason that pensions exist is to economically support people who are no longer able to do it themselves. We need to have such a system in place if we don’t want to abandon older people to their fate. If life extension treatments take ill health and age-related disabilities out of the equation entirely, pensions as we know them today will no longer be needed, because you will be able to support yourself through your own work regardless of your age.

So let’s imagine health extension therapies do become widely available – and in 30 years you reach age 80 in good health. Will you need to keep working?  Of course it is nearly impossible to imagine what the world in 2050 will be like – but a few ideas come to mind.

One, assuming we still need money to buy things, you may have been able to reach “financial independence” well before then. That just means that you have accumulated enough financial resources to make work an option, not a necessity. Secondly, with exponentially advancing AI and robotics, what work if any will be available for humans to do anyway? Thirdly, technology has a deflationary effect on prices. With exponentials at work for another 30 years, will things/services really cost much? Maybe we will just need a fraction of what we think we might need re “retirement planning”.  Finally, the idea of Universal Basic Income – where the government pays everyone a base salary (actual one of the election platform ideas of US Presidential hopeful Andrew Yang) – may have come to fruition – and may make needing to earn an income even less a issue!

It seems the whole logic behind the idea of needing to save for retirement may disappear as exponential technologies transform our bodies and our economic reality. Now I wouldn’t necessarily give up on the need for saving money – or go out and blow whatever retirement saving you have on that world cruise. Of course the important operative word here is “may”. There are many futures where savings will be needed – including what I think is a very probably one – your Health Fund.

Your “Health Fund”, or whatever you’d like to call savings set aside to pay for health related expenses not covered by the state, may need to pay out-of-pocket for new life-saving therapies that just came out but are not yet covered by any health plan. Many supplements are already available to boost your NAD levels or trigger Senolytic pathways to reduce or remove those pesky, inflammation causing “zombie cells”. The combination of these and possibly future better supplements may cost you hundreds of dollars a month.

Meanwhile, all kinds of medical gadgets, wearables and apps are coming out that give us the ability to track our health real-time and over time to get more informed readings on what is going on in our bodies. But of course the devices and apps cost money.

Or, you may need to take a quick trip to Singapore or Panama to access that stem cell therapy to fix your bum knee (or completely eliminate the wrinkles on your face). Medical Tourism certainly could become a big expense item given the speed of medical innovation and discovery is accelerating much, much faster then regulatory bodies can keep up to approve them locally.

So yes, the logic behind retirement savings may diminish or disappear but we will very likely still be wanting for significant savings as the health extension revolution unfolds. A second fund besides your “Health Fund” is you “Education and Training Fund” – more on that in future post.

Live long, live well, and prosper!

Michael