Maybe not! Consider that retirement planning is about the future – your future. And given the acceleration of change in our world, consider that your future will be dramatically different than your past.
cast your mind into the future when advances in science, nutrition and health care begin to take hold and extend our lifespans. It will be a time when age 80 won’t mean falling prey to the typical decline of mind and body that we normally associate with old age. Instead, he suggests we’ll be healthy, energetic and willing and able to keep learning – and keep working.
Essentially in every crucial area that retirement planning makes assumptions, dramatic changes are coming. I believe that how we think about and plan our retirement is about to be completely undone.
“It’s the idea that if everyone would just, in a one-time event, dedicate one percent of their net worth to life-extension science, that would be something like a trillion dollars- we would almost certainly be able to, in say ten to fifteen years’ time, conquer most diseases and probably eliminate human death itself.” Zoltan Istvan
It is time for financial planners to incorporate the insights of futurists. They need to do their best to help their clients consider life scenarios that take into account possible future outcomes. They need to become Retirement Futurists!
Impacts to your income, your assets, your pension safety, your longevity are just a few reasons that the exponential advances in technology need to be part of your thinking and planning.
The idea that by helping people live healthier and longer lives we can also greatly help the global economy is, I find, very intriguing. This is the thesis of Alex Zhavoronkov’s book “The Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform the Global Economy”.
Recently, Stephen Euin Cobb, of the podcast series “The Future and You”, interviewed me on all things “Retirement Singularity”. We got into healthy life extension, technological disruption, life coaching and the impacts to personal finances.
In particular we discussed most of the themes inside the “End of Retirement As We Know It” report.
A new book entitled “Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform the Global Economy” proposes at breakthrough solution to the approaching economic crisis. Namely, advance anti-aging and regenerative medicine and charge the cultural significance of “retirement”.
Essentially, Aubrey says that, while preventing aging may be possible in the future, the processes of aging are so complex, that this project will take many, many years. However, another approach that he promotes via his SENS organization is to develop therapies now to repair the damage that the processes of aging have produced in our bodies. This approach has the benefit of being do-able in our lifetime – and perhaps even within the lifetime of people currently as old at 70.