3 ways to rethink old age and retirement, MIT expert says
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Americans are living longer — and it's changing the nature of retirement planning.
The classic retirement framework aims for seniors to have enough money to fund their lifestyle in old age. While not incorrect, the framework is «incomplete,» Joseph Coughlin, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, told CNBC.
«Longevity planning» is a better way for society to think about old age — especially since the future is «much grayer than it's ever been before,» he said.
There's a roughly 50% chance that Americans who are 65 years old today will make it to 85 — a period that lasts about 8,000 days, or a third of their adult life, Coughlin said.
Instead of a short period earmarked purely for leisure and travel, retirement in the future will be increasingly dynamic one, in which people might have different part-time gigs and find other ways to stay happy and engaged.
«Leisure is a story we wrote for retirement when it was short,» said Coughlin, author of «The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World's Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market.» «Life is the new story we need to write when it becomes so much longer.»
«This is an entirely new longevity frontier,» he added.
Within that framework, there are some big questions people planning for their retirement years should be asking — but which are often overlooked.
Here are three of them, according to Coughlin.
This question gets to what makes you smile — and how you're going to get that thing.
Imagine it's a hot summer night and you're craving an ice cream cone. Ice cream, in this case, is
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