The best life expectancy calculators
While poking around on the Society of Actuaries website — come on, I’m a nerd! — I found their Longevity Illustrator, a tool for estimating your expected lifespan.
The Longevity Illustrator asks for only a bare minimum of information: your age, your gender, your health, and whether you smoke. Given that info, it generates the statistical probability that you’ll live to any particular age.
Why only these four factors? The website explains:
Longevity depends on many factors, such as lifestyle and genetics. However, these four pieces of information have been shown to produce reasonable approximations of an individual’s longevity.
In other words, there are certainly other factors that affect longevity but these four are enough to get a good approximation. As for me, statistically I have another 37 years left on this earth! I have a 50% chance of living until I’m 86
Earlier this year, I wrote that life expectancy is the most important variable in retirement planning. In that article, I shared three other great longevity calculators: the Abaris How Long Will I Live? calculator, the Living to 100 life expectancy calculator, and the John Hancock life expectancy calculator. (These tools estimate I’ll live until 86, 82, and 81, respectively.)
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There are 1 comment to "The best life expectancy calculators".
Bengen’s analysis suggests that there’s only a minor dip in SWR as you extend the duration of retirement, with a ~.4% variance to essentially last forever. I think that’s why the FIRE crowd commonly will target a 3.5% SWR, sometimes 3%, depending on age.
Personally it’ll likely aim for something around 3.5% as well but it’s also worth noting that nearly all of the popular SWR analysis out there neglects additional sources of income – and folks who tend to retire early also tend to earn at least a small amount of money after retirement. If you earn $5k/year doing part-time work after retirement and are on a $40k/year budget, that’d take a 4% SWR on a $1M portfolio down to 3.5%. I don’t think that’s unrealistic at all…
His research also doesn’t consider SS.