Longevity

Barron's had an interesting cover story about longevity possibly expanding well beyond what people now think in terms of how long they will live.

On one level longer life seems intuitive in that all technology is advancing at an accelerating pace. Michael Miliken says cancer will be gone by 2015. There will also be advances in how heart disease is managed and treated. There article then talks about nano technology creating little robots that go all through the body fixing things.

A big part of aging is caused by damage that occurs in cells. Science will find more and more ways to prevent or reverse this damage. Some of this will happen within the timeline stated in the article. How much will happen is the variable.

I do not want to turn this into a morality debate. It makes sense to think about living longer from a dollar and cents standpoint.

This could mean (recurring theme alert) planning retirement will have to be done differently. We will have to work longer, we will have to own a lot of equities longer and it will create many stresses on our economy, our social services, natural resources and many other things.

This ties into an idea that the US will need evolve in order to prosper. I believe that it can but this could be serious.

In my opinion successful retirement planning includes staying in touch with new fill in the blank. New will never stop. Staying in touch with new can make retirement planning much easier or perhaps a better way to look at would be that staying in touch with new can stave off hardship.