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Comment by angrybits | Hacker News Reader

This scares the hell out of me from a retirement planning perspective. If I outlive my savings, what then?

If people lived forever, why would they ever retire? I imagine you'd take a 5 year sabbatical every 20 years or so and you'd probably even head to school a bunch of times to change careers if you got bored of centuries of the same vocation.

Who is going to hire you? Try getting a job at 62 right now.

Who is going to hire you at 20, right now? It's a problem we have to solve for everyone.

It's a problem that is far more acute for certain ages than others....

Actually the real problem is people who have your attitude about the problem.

That's a rather bizarre comment. Would you care to qualify? Or maybe add just a little bit of substance?

My attitude doesn't have anything to do with statistical reality.

A big part of that is employers not wanting to invest in someone who is about to permanently leave the workforce. If the retirement age scaled with lifespan, or adapted along the lines of what landryraccoon suggested, that would probably change. If you went back 200 years from today, most people would probably think it's not even possible that 63% of my generation would be unmarried by age 30.

Part of it might also be that employers may not feel a 62 year old can do what a 32 year old can. (Unmarried at 30 is an unrelated issue.) Are they wrong?

Where are 95 years olds going to work? What are the going to be capable of doing? Uber drivers? They are going to have to fix a bunch of stuff rather than just extend life for this to be feasible. I hope they do that first, and worry about extending life after they have fixed degeneration.

Or we, are going to have to re-arrange our social/economic systems considerably so work isn't such necessity.

If I understand correctly, the implication is that if science can make us live a thousand years, a 62 year old would be almost every bit as vital as a 32 year old. The life extension would be at a fundamental level, not just keeping older folks on life support for longer.

This is where you consider buying a life annuity from a life insurance company if this really concerns you.

How would a dramatic breakthrough in longevity affect the solvency of life insurance/annuity companies?

Generally speaking, there's a decent chance that they wouldn't be able to afford honoring the agreements. I would speculate that what would happen would be up to whatever regulatory body that oversees this. Most actuaries I've met consider life to stop no later than 120, and products reflects this.

You can compare the price of insuring against invalidity as e.g. a 30 year old with the price of a life annuity to see just how expensive it could be.

You could argue, fairly successfully, that the existing medical system is oriented around extracting all money from people before and shortly after their death. Its a very common problem at this time. So at least its not unknown ground.

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