Would You Want to Know the Date of Your Death? by Scott Stolz, CFP, RICP (week 66)

 

If you could know the date of your death, would you want to?  On our drive back to St. Petersburg from our summer stay at our place at the Lake of the Ozarks, my wife and I listened to “My Husband’s Wife”, by Alice Feeney – a book I highly recommend.  One of the many plot twists is around whether or not the company owned by one of the central characters can actually predict that date of a person’s death as it claims it can.  Not surprisingly, that got me wondering if I would want to know my death date.





From a retirement planning perspective, the answer would clearly be “yes”.  As I’ve discussed in several previous blogs, one of the hardest parts of creating a retirement income plan is not knowing how many years you will live in retirement.  Will your retirement assets need to sustain you for 5 years, 15 years, 30 years or even more than that? You can easily go online and find a life expectancy calculator that will give you your life expectancy.  However, this is merely the date at which 50% of the people of similar age and characteristics will die before that age and 50% will live beyond that age.  It’s far from precise.  Therefore, most financial plans will assume an age several years beyond your calculated life expectancy in order to build in a cushion.  The bottom line is that while your life expectancy is a good place to start, it’s far from precise.  But if you can tell me the exact date you will die, it becomes pretty simple to build a highly efficient retirement income plan. 

And the benefits of having this information do not end there.  Armed with this information I can give you better advice as to when to start receiving Social Security benefits.  Someone who will die at a relatively young age benefits from taking benefits at age 62, while someone who lives beyond their life expectancy would be better off waiting until age 70.  The same theory holds when considering converting a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA.  The longer you live, the more you will benefit from the extra years of tax-free growth and tax-free withdrawals.

So, while the financial planner side of me would certainly want to know this information, I still don’t know if I would like to know my death date.  On one hand, it would be nice to know how many years I have to tick things off of my bucket list.  And as the Tim McGraw song says, I would probably appreciate things more if I was to “Live Life Like You Were Dying”.  I’d bet each bottle of wine would taste better if I knew that it was one of my last.  But still.  Do I really want to start a daily countdown to that day?  Do I want to potentially give up the hope of seeing my grandchildren graduate from college (assuming there are still colleges by then) and become parents to my great-grandchildren?  I don’t think so.  But then again, it would be nice to know. 

What do you think?  Would you want to know your death date?    

 

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