Bad Retirement Savers Expect to Die Young

What You Need to Know

Club Vita helps employers, insurers and other pension risk transfer players analyze longevity risk.
It calculated survey taker life expectancies using demographic factors such as age but without using health status details.
The average life expectancy estimation pessimism gap was 5.3 years for U.S. women and 1.3 years for U.S. men.

What workers think about their retirement savings is closely related to how long they think they will live, according to a new Club Vita life expectancy survey.

Workers who said that their savings would be enough to pay for a comfortable retirement agreed with Club Vita about how long they might live.

Workers who said their savings would be too small to pay for a comfortable retirement predicted that they would die about 7.1 years earlier than Club Vita would have predicted.

Club Vita

Club Vita is a firm that helps employers, insurers and other players in the pension industry analyze “longevity risk,” or the possibility that workers might live much longer than expected and cost a pension plan or annuity issuer much more than expected.

The firm based its new worker life expectancy analysis on survey responses from 3,000 workers, ages 40 through 60, in its three main markets: the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The workers answered the questions in December 2021, shortly after the COVID-19 delta variant had caused a big surge in deaths, and just as the COVID-19 omicron variant was starting to get attention.

The Overall Life Expectancy Prediction Gap

Club Vita calculated each survey participant’s life expectancy using standard demographic information, such as age, sex and location, but without using information about the participant’s lifestyle, chronic health conditions or exposure to COVID-19.

Typical participants were much more pessimistic about their life expectancy than Club Vita.

Club Vita was 6.1 years more optimistic about life expectancy than the average female participant and 2.5 years more optimistic than the average male participant.