Will You Outlive Your Money?
Medical science accelerated by AI is powering a paradigm shift in age related deaths.
From dental implants to hip implants to any organ transplant, humans have the ability to live decades longer. Perhaps the only mitigating factor to living past 100 is our diet, which has progressively deteriorated in the last 50 years.
Regardless, science and AI will win out, and many of us will live past 100. If you are under the age of 50 now and maintain a clean diet, you could expect to live to 110 or 120.
What science has not kept up with is our ability to afford the many life extension options offered, nor even how we are going to maintain the cash flow required to support ourselves for an additional 2-3 decades.
Most retirement models factor a 3-4% reduction in principal in addition to the interest, dividends, or appreciation income for a specific principal amount to fund the rest of our lives. They factor in living perhaps to your mid-80s, less with chronic disease.
The point is, if you are healthy, in addition to figuring out how to stay that way, we all have to figure out how to afford to live long-term.
The traditional model is save and invest until you reach a principal figure large enough to support you for a fixed number of years… 15-20 normally. That fixed number will need to be double for most of us. So, whereas a nest egg of 1-2 million in addition to our home would suffice, we are going to need 2-4 million.
And factor in Memory Care. While Medicare may cover you in assisted living or a nursing home, if you get dementia, those same facilities will not take you; only a memory care facility will. And they are not covered by Medicare or traditional health insurance. My mother, for example, required five years in a “home” not covered by any insurance, and it cost $6,000 a month in after-tax dollars. And they can easily be $10,000 a month in some states.
If you are just now learning about this new kind of future living, you may not have time or the income to save and invest an additional 2 million. You may not even be saving and investing for the first 1-2 million required.
And if you think Social Security will cover you, remember that the number of retirees drawing benefits is growing much faster than the number of workers paying into the system, putting significant strain on Social Security’s long-term sustainability.
We would have thought the US government used the monies we paid and our employers paid in while we were working to invest and compound such that our social security payments were funded from these 30-40 years of compounding. Our government did not do this. Most social security funds have been spent on other “expenses,” and our current social security income is funded by current workers’ contributions. This is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme.
Will our social security be honored and funds available in 20-30 years from now when it is time for us to collect? For a country that has not run a balanced budget in 24 years, goes into debt 1,800,000,000,000 dollars every year, and has a total debt of $38.3 trillion, what do you think?
The solution? Build Asset Income. Build something worth that 2-4 million that pays you the same cash flow as if you had invested that much principal. Build an Asset that does not require you to invest but rather relies on your initiative, creativity, vision, courage, and work ethic to create it.
You could write books, screenplays, music, produce art, invent things, build a few million followers on YouTube, or find a product you authentically can rave about and build a compounded community of customers on which you get paid every month.
Network Marketing with the right product and host company is the quickest and least risky way to build wealth from scratch. The model relies on a simple growth rule… ”Every customer may enroll other customers on which they get paid”. Since every customer may do this, the rule creates a compounded or exponential growth factor to the customer base.
If I enroll 4 customers and they each enroll 4, who each enroll 4, who each enroll 4 , I end up with 340 customers. If they each buy $100 of products, my business creates $34,000 a month in revenue. I may earn about 7% of that or $2,500 a month. The difference is my raving fan customer community may not be done raving. If each customer just enrolls one more customer, my $2,500 grows to $5,000, and so on. Each $5,000 a month is worth $1,000,000 as an asset.
Obviously, you have to pick a product that will be in demand and relevant 30 years from now, and you have to pick a company that has proven it can and will be in business 30-40 years from now. How do you do that? Pick one that has already proven it. Pick one that is 30-40 years old already, or at least 20.
You can start in as little as 15 minutes a day, 15 minutes we are no doubt wasting worrying about our financial future.
Let’s do something about it!
Find out if you will outlive your money using my financial security worksheet:
Financial Security Worksheet
P.S. My blogs are, for me, a conversation. I rant for a bit and then … if so inspired, you respond. Your comments close the loop of conversation. They let me know I was heard. They let me know I contributed something … or not. I encourage you to close the loop … or open a new one and say something.