Robert Brokamp

Go ahead, come up with an estimate in your head.

If you guessed 19 years for a male and 22 years for a female, you're in the less than a third of people who got the question right in a survey from the TIAA Institute and the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center, and highlighted in the current issue of Kiplinger's magazine.

The largest percentage of respondents underestimated life expectancy, and one in four chose the I don't know option.

But understanding how long you could live is an important variable when calculating whether you're saving enough to retire, when you can retire, and how much you can spend in retirement while not running out of money.

When analyzing your retirement plan, you probably shouldn't assume the average life expectancy.

After all, half of people live longer.

Plus, if you're listening to this podcast, you likely have above-average education and above-average wealth, two factors that are strongly correlated without living the averages.

You're also probably really good-looking, but that's just the cherry on top.

Nowadays, a reasonable default option for a retirement plan is living to age 95, since there's a 20-25% chance that one member of a 65-year-old couple will live to their mid-90s.

But to get a more individualized estimate of your life expectancy and to see your odds of making it to various ages, visit longevityillustrator.org, a tool co-created by the American Academy of Actuaries and the Society of Actuaries.

And speaking of wealth, our next item comes from a post on X from Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody's Analytics.

According to Zandi, household net worth is now more than eight times after-tax income, compared with an average of 5.5 times after-tax income in the decades between World War II and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.

This ratio of wealth to income is at an all-time high.

It reached over six during the dot-com days and almost seven during the real estate bubble, but the subsequent downturns brought the ratios back down to that average of 5.5.

Of course, not everyone has seen their wealth increase so much.

The main beneficiaries have been homeowners and investors in stocks, particularly the wealthiest of investors.

According to the Federal Reserve, the top 10% own 87% of all equities and mutual funds.

But the good news is that many people of all income levels have benefited from the current bull market.

According to a recent study from BlackRock, more than half of Americans living on low and moderate incomes, defined as annual incomes ranging from $30,000 to $80,000, now own stocks.

The majority are new investors who began investing within the past five years.