More than 4K professionals – the largest contingency of aging experts representing business, government, policy, education, research, finance, and general services, embarked upon San Francisco recently for their annual conference that featured over 600 workshops spanning over 50 content areas addressing the most pertinent issues surrounding the aging of America.

This past year, the aging profession – and our nation – has seen landmark changes in health care and in older adult services. As the demands to serve the needs of a rapidly growing older adult population coincide with continued budget cuts, it becomes even more important for Americans to better understand the role we all play in this new longevity revolution.

While there continues to be daily media play on a variety of aging issues, the majority of Americans still don’t seem to have a good grasp on both the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that come with living long. Yet of most concern, is their continued inability to plan for this phase in their lives – particularly financially, and health runs a close second. 

Over the past 25 years, my primary focus as been to help people better prepare for a phase in life that most approach with great fear and trepidation – primarily because they have a preconceived, negative notion of an aging process they believe they have little control over. Frankly, it’s quite the opposite. The less you prepare, the less control you have … and the more you prepare, the better your chances are of success.

The reality is, aging in America is a new frontier. We’ve never been here before – it’s unchartered territory for the most part so we’re all figuring it out as we go. We’ve never had the numbers of people we have living as long as they’re living, and living as well as they’re living too. This creates both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand it’s fantastic that through the extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare we’ve been able to achieve healthy, long lives for the majority of Americans. The challenge of course, is when long life becomes both difficult and expensive. But perhaps there’s a way to hedge against that – it certainly is an option, and perhaps one we need to all start paying more attention to, literally.

The economic reality of long life is a serious issue that this country has got to start paying more attention to and helping people better prepare for the reality of living long – a longevity management mindset mentality would be of great benefit to Americans today. Yet unfortunately, the majority of people have no idea how long they’ll likely live, let alone how much it will cost them to do so. The average American thinks they can retire on $250K. The reality, unfortunately, is that $200K is the projected health care costs alone for the Baby Boomers to go from age 60 to 90 – just healthcare costs! Additionally, the majority of people who do try and plan financially for their retirement, also underestimate how long they’ll likely live. The combination of low-ball financial projections of how much it will cost to retire, combined with underestimating how long our finances must actually last, is a dangerous combination.

But where are we supposed to learn about all this? We haven’t been taught about it in our schools, and while the majority of financial firms do a good job preparing their clients for this reality, the majority of Americans don’t have a financial planner. The school system is likely where this all needs to start, and it’s my belief it should not just be financial planning, but rather life planning – to encompass both the financial and lifestyle aspects of living long. Currently three states require high school students to take financial education – yet 35 states require students take sexual education.

There’s a lot of work to be done. And as we face a time where Americans’ debt is soaring, savings are dwindling, and pensions are disappearing, the reality is we’ve all got to be more responsible for our lives and our financial futures as it’s nobody else’s job to take care of us – it’s our job to take care of us.

The aging of America is not only one of the most extraordinary events of our time, but one that will affect every person and every aspect of our society. It will take all of us, working together and taking responsibility for our own lives, to achieve all the positive outcomes a long-lived society can provide.

Kelly Ferrin, gerontologist, longevity expert and author of “What’s Age Got To Do With It? Secrets to Aging in Extraordinary Ways” has been studying aging and retirement issues for over 25 years. She was one of the first to ever receive a degree in this field from the prestigious Andrus School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California, the top school in the nation for the study of age-related issues.

website: kellyferrin.com ••• email: ageangel@earthlink.net