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- Now this notion that you're supposed to work like nuts for 40 years and then have nothing but free time, people are saying, you know let's question that whole model.

So let me throw a curve ball at you right from the beginning.

I know in the TV commercials and in popular discussion, it looks like the young people are supposed to be having all the fun, not what's happening.

I got to tell you, I think the new frontier is maturity, it's longevity, it's life's third age, and it's totally uncharted.

- [Narrator] Dr. Ken Dychtwald is one of America's foremost thought leaders and original thinkers regarding the financial healthcare and lifestyle implications of the longevity revolution.

A psychologist, gerontologist and co-founder and CEO of Age Wave he has for over 40 years helped shape a more positive perception of aging and retirement.

A best-selling author, he is here to share his vision of life's third age.

- Hi, I'm Ken Dychtwald and welcome to a look at life's third age.

Let me give you a way that I'm thinking about this program.

My kids are now in their thirties.

When they were in high school, there was an enormous amount of attention given to helping them figure out the next little piece of their lives.

Are you going to go get a job or do you wanna go to college?

You're going to go to college, you sure you don't wanna be in the military?

Okay, if you're gonna go to college, should it be a small school or a big school?

You wanna go far away or you wanna stay close to home?

What are you gonna study?

And then we took trips to the various colleges and there were college counselors and websites all for a four year period of life.

Yet when it comes to life after 50 or 60 or beyond, there's no orientation program, there's no guidebook, there's no college counselors or third age counselors.

So what I wanna try to do is to give you a look at what's coming and the kinds of choices that might lie in front of you.

And I'm giving you lots of examples of people who were journeying through this stage of life incredibly successfully.

So fasten your seat belts, take a deep breath, forget everything you've ever thought about the rest of your life and allow me to share with you a little bit of what I've learned during the past 45 years as I've been studying this issue.

Let me break this down into pieces.

First, we are in the middle of a longevity revolution.

Interestingly during the 20th century, every time there was a breakthrough in medicine or public health or antibiotics or better distribution of foods, one of the effects was that more and more people live longer and longer and longer.

And as a result of that, if you look with at this chart of the life expectancy of the past 1000 years, you see that during the 20th century the average life expectancy vaulted due to those medical and health breakthroughs.

And that's pretty amazing because back in the 1850s couples weren't saying gee, honey, what would we like to do after retirement?

Because you wouldn't be alive after retirement.

There have always been older people but very few.

They're living to 60 or 70 or 80 or even a hundred are now commonplace.

In fact, as a result of these breakthroughs, two thirds of all the people who have ever lived past 65 in the entire history of the world are alive today.

And so the notion of what one could be after work, or whether one reinvented themselves at 60 or fell in love again at 70 or 80 or train for a triathlon at 90, were not part of the human experience.

Let me give us another reference that you will find interesting.

We hear a lot of talk about our constitution.

When our constitution was drafted, the average life expectancy in America at birth was 37 years.

The median age was 16 but take a look with me at this picture.

What do you notice on the heads of all these folks?

Wigs, white wigs.

In colonial times, it was believed that the older you were, the more powerful you were, the more wise you were and so people either dyed their hair or powdered their wigs to look old.

Boy, that's a switch from what we've been dealing with in recent decades.

I also think and initially having been trained as a psychotherapist, I also think that it's not just a matter of how many years am I gonna live?

Or how do I be healthy for those years?

I think the bigger issue for many of us is who am I?

Who am I after I've raised my kids?

Who am I after I finished my career?

Who am I after my parents have passed away?

And so the idea of longevity rubs up against questions of identity.

And they're not just who have I been and therefore who am I now?

But who am I hoping to become?

So let me throw a curve ball at you right from the beginning.

The word retirement if you look at Webster's on a bridge dictionary, it says to disappear, to go away, to withdraw.

So I think it's time we retired retirement.

What's emerging is what I'll call it's not my, I invent this phrase, but I'll call life third age.

Let me explain.

Many philosophers and often from the European traditions of lifelong learning comes a view about stages of life.

The belief is that the first 30 years of life where most of us were situated during most of history, the focus was on biologic development.

Also you know, kind of learning and learning some basic skills and crafts and the beginnings of forming your identity.

You know, who am I?

What group do I relate to?

How am I going to love?

What will I make of myself?

And then there's a second age of life.

Here the focus is on family formation for most.

Parenting, big junk of one's identity between 30 and 60 is taken up by concern over your kids and also as we all know a big portion of our lives oriented towards productive work and career development.

And I would point out that up until the last few decades most civilizations were oriented towards sort of the first 30 and then ultimately the 30 to 60th year of life.

And so that's where the focus was, largely on youth or what I'll call middle essence.

But there's a third age emerging as we're living longer and longer and longer.

People are now talking about freedom.

And what I've heard in focus groups all over the world is people are talking about freedom from and freedom to.

Let me explain.

So you reach your 60th birthday and for the first time you have some freedom from maybe work.

I can sleep late, I don't have to please my boss, you don't have to raise your kids.

either their kids or their grandchildren, but there's a lot of freedom from those sort of pressures and obligations.

But people also talk about freedom to.

You know what?

I can train for a marathon, I can play guitar if I feel like it and who cares if I'm any good, I can do what I want.

Also you're not at 60 or 70 just a little more wrinkled version of who you were when you were 25.

There's more emotional intelligence, there's more perspective, there's more maturity and last I'll say that life after 60 can involve a new purpose.

Who do I wanna be?

How do I wanna be remembered?

How do I wanna be involved in my community?

And more and more what we're seeing is that life after 60 is not just a time to step off the playing field but a lot of people think of it as the best time to give back.

We and many other organizations and institutions from AERP to Stanford have been doing studies about how folks are doing in their third age.

And amazingly, most people are doing pretty well.

In fact, if you look at the idea of fun, it looks like people are having the most fun in their lives after their work years are over.

I know in the TV commercials and in popular discussion, it looks like the young people are supposed to be having all the fun, it's not what's happening.

At the same time there's more contentment.

People become more both resilient and more content with who they are.

They come to peace with their lives.

And last happiness sores in maturity.

And so the third age rather than being a time of loss and kind of falling off the track as it might've been for our grandparents, today the third age is emerging as perhaps the very best period of life.

One of the best ways to ensure a satisfying and fulfilling third age is to have a plan.

A thoughtful plan can be a smart thing to do.

There's a caveat.

A lot of people think, oh, once you plan for something, it's done, you got it handled.

Well, let me give me what I've learned about this over the course of the decades.

Let's think of the Apollo mission as a good example.

Apollo 11 and his trip to the moon was the most excessively planned adventure in human history.

- [Narrator] Three, two, one.

- Everything was figured out in advance yet when that rocket took off 90% of the time it was off course and so the entire trip was a trip of course corrections.

And so it is with our lives, it's not a destination in our third age.

Retirement is not simply now I'm retired I got it done.

It's a journey and there's continued need for course corrections.

Either because something difficult has happened or because there's something possible you could become.

As I was preparing for this public television program somehow my mind spun to the 1950s.

Roger Bannister himself a medical student was a runner and at that time it was believed that humans could not break a four-minute mile.

It was simply not physiologically possible to go that fast.

Bannister in 1954 I believe it was broke the four-minute mile and all of a sudden everybody around the world started thinking, well, maybe humans can run faster than we ever thought.

In fact, 46 days later, someone else ran faster than he had.

And not only that over the coming decades thousands of people were breaking four minute miles.

So the idea is that somebody does something that we haven't seen before and it becomes sort of like a role model and everything transforms behind that.

I'll give an example from the field of aging and life's third age.

A few decades ago, I was asked to provide commentary for John Glenn's decision to go up into space.

And I knew Glen, he was a tough guy and I thought, wow, this is pretty amazing.

A 77 year old deciding to go up into space.

And I watched his initial interviews and a lot of the young reporters were kinda poking at him and they were kinda like, don't you think you're a little old for this?

And Glenn turned to these reporters and he said, hey, just because I'll be 77, doesn't mean I still don't have dreams.

Well, that really got me thinking because I think we have come to think during our shorter lived eras that young people have hopes and dreams, and then you get to be a little bit older and you either fulfill them or you didn't, that's that.

But what Glen was suggesting is that if we're going to be living longer lives maybe you can have new dreams, fresh dreams, better dreams, different dreams and maybe at the age of 60, you can decide to do your best work or the age of 80 discover your true calling or the age of 70, become a volunteer and open a church or synagogue or a mosque, or frankly at the age of 90 if you've been divorced or widowed, maybe fall in love and find the love of your life.

And so what I encourage each of you to do is to just stop for a second and think, have you been dreaming of the next chapter of your life?

And if not, maybe it's time to get that process started.

[upbeat music] When we ask people who have lived long lives what's essential?

And there's no surprises here, people say having good health is the most important ingredient to a successful aging and a successful third age.

That can be a challenge.

If you look with me at this chart, we've crafted this.

There's some changes that happen to the body as we grow older, more likely to have circulatory problems, stiffness or arthritis in the joints, varicosity in the veins and by the way, I could really ruin your whole rest of your day.

Lots of things happen but they're all to some extent preventable and to some extent we can take action to keep ourselves healthy and youthful as we age.

As we try to sort out the difference between youth and health and aging, interestingly, more and more people are speaking out.

I saw this clip on TikTok the other night.

This is Elisa Berrini Gomez.

- Let me this talk by letting you know that I do not lack self-confidence.

I read a lot of comments from a lot of people telling me that if I dyed my gray hair, I would look 10 to 15 years younger.

I do ask them, what do I gain by looking younger?

Is it approval from men?

Is approval from women?

Looking younger wouldn't make me healthier.

I am 55 years old.

I've lived a great youth.

Now I would like to live a great older age.

- What Elisa Gomez is pointing out is not a new idea.

In fact, for thousands of years humans seem sort of sorting out how do we match our health span to our lifespan?

This is a non-trivial issue because if you look at the United States for example while we have an almost 79 year average life expectancy at birth, we're only middling worldwide.

There's about 33 countries that have a higher life expectancy than ours.

For example, Canada and Japan live much than we do.

But also we average about 10 years of illness at the end of our lives which is extremely high and that's not what anyone wants and so we've got to focus all of our talents, both individually and social policy-wise to try to create a world in which healthy, vital aging is the norm.

Some of the things we need to sharpen up, we need to make sure our medical system is excellent at both prevention and dealing with the needs of older men and women.

We're not there, in fact we're behind the curve, we've got over 58,000 pediatricians but we've got less than 6,000 geriatricians.

And as a reflection of our priorities in this country, take a look at how people are paid if they're doctors in America.

People who focus on the care and need of older people get paid the least yet older people is what we're becoming and we need a medical system that takes terrific care of us.

Another thing we need more of, science particularly with regard to brain health.

What are some of the things that we can do?

We can take a lot better care of ourselves.

You know, most people in America know what ought to be done in order to live and feel great yet only about half of our population takes action.

Health and nutrition.

For example in our family, we eat a largely plant-based diet.

I personally haven't eaten red meat for almost 35 years.

Hydration is really important.

Making sure to have a sufficient range of foods and produce critically important to staying healthy.

What else?

Exercising regularly, not hard to do.

You can take a walk, you can go for a swim, you can jump up and down and do calisthenics.

There's lots of classes, lots of workshops, lots of things on the web that you can tune into and yet about half of us do not exercise regularly.

Managing stress.

Boy, whether that's through prayer or meditation or taking some time for a quiet walk or doing a peaceful activity whether for you that's cooking pastry or playing with the grandkids, calming ourselves down particularly during difficult periods in history like the one we've been going through.

And let's not forget social connections.

Often when we think of health and longevity, we only envision exercise and nutrition and managing stress and such, but our social connections are often would give us the vitality and the energy to live on and to live better.

Let me show you a great example of a woman who demonstrates the possibility of fitness in her later years.

[soft music] Where are we heading?

I think we're heading to what I'll call precision medicine.

You know like you can get ways which will tell you how to get from here to there with traffic and with other conditions that the algorithms are tuned into, I think most of us would like to be healthier.

We'd like to be as fit as we can be, but we're confused.

You know, which diet is right for me?

Which vitamins should I be taking if any at all?

What kind of exercise should I do?

For example, I've had my right shoulder replaced and I've got hypercholesterolemia, I've also got hypertension.

So I wanna know exactly what I should do, not what most people should do.

And I think more and more we're gonna be heading in a direction where each one of us will be able to get a prescription for optimal wellness.

So when it comes to health and wellness.

Wellness should not just be the province of the young.

In fact, we have to work even harder as we get older, you got to work harder to lose weight, you gotta work a little bit harder to stay fit, you gotta work harder to make sure you don't get beaten down by sarcopenia which is a weakening of the muscles.

And so as we age wellness becomes an even more important ingredient not less.

Key critical question for all of us is how do I match my health span to my lifespan so that I can have wellness for life?

[upbeat music] All right, now we're gonna have some fun taking look at time affluence.

What is time affluence?

Well, one of the things that happens if we live a longer and longer life than our grandparents did is we're gonna have a whole lot of free time in the decades that come after our working years.

I know when my grandparents reached their 60th or 65th birthday, they were kinda dazzled to have lived that long and were kinda enjoying the idea of just a little social time, maybe a vacation or two before their batteries wear out.

But we're gonna have a lot more time than that.

And one of the questions becomes where are you gonna put that longevity bonus?

And maybe you haven't even thought about it.

Well let me give you a way to kinda toy with this in your mind.

Historically, we've lived what I'll call a linear life plan.

If you take a look at this graphic here, you learned you did that once, then you worked.

Well actually, I've got some pictures you learned one time and the idea was that by the time you graduated high school or college, you learned pretty well everything you'd ever need to know and it last you for a lifetime.

Hmm I don't think that's real anymore.

But, and then the idea was you'd fall in love and it will always last till the last breath you took and then you had some kids and they always turned out perfect and then right before you died, you took a cruise and that was the package.

And so that was the idea.

You lived the kind of a linear life plan.

You learned, you worked, you rested, and then you died and you did them all in sequence and you did them all once.

But if you knew that you'd be having an extra 20 or 30 years of life beyond what your great grandparents ever imagined, would you stick it at the end?

Would you simply wanna be old longer?

Now what everybody says is if I knew I was gonna live longer and I had that freedom of time, I might like to distribute that longevity bonus.

You know maybe I'll go back to school after retiring.

Maybe I'll try out some additional leisure in my middle years.

Maybe I'll find myself going back to college and learning a new craft when I'm 70 and this cyclic life plan becomes the norm throughout all of life.

But let me drill down into the third age.

So my company Age Wave has conducted studies both in the United States and as I mentioned all around the world and we've asked thousands and thousands of pre-retirees perhaps like yourself if you're still working, what do you think you're gonna miss the most when you stop working?

And perhaps like yourself, people say I'm gonna miss the income but then we've asked thousands of thousands of retirees.

What do you miss the most now that you're in this stage of life?

And without a doubt, it's not the money, it's the social interactions.

People miss the action, they miss the connections with others, they miss the stimulation.

Money matters but not as much as all of these other variables.

So we've asked people what represents the ideal plan in terms of work or leisure or learning for the next stage of life?

And here's what we see, about 29% of the population say they wanna stop working when they're 60 or 65 and never work again.

And by the way, I've now been in gerontology for over 40 years and I can tell you there's been a flip-flop.

When I was a young man in the field, successful people, the super successful people were retiring the youngest and in fact it was a mark of success.

If you met somebody at a meeting or a dinner, and you said, what do you do?

And they said, I'm retired.

And I said, well, how old are you when you retired?

They said 51, you'd say, wow, what a success you are.

But today it's the opposite.

The super successful people wanna keep working in their sixties and seventies and eighties.

It's the people who are struggling with their careers who have done physical labor that wanna stop working permanently.

Some people wanna work full-time but it's a tiny little fraction.

And by the way I've given talks now at colleges around the country and most young people, they don't want to work full-time either.

You know, this notion that somebody dreamed up in the industrial era, that you're supposed to work like nuts for 40 years and then have nothing but free time.

People are saying, you know, let's question that whole model.

What most people are saying about their third age is they wanna either work part-time or they wanna cycle in and out of projects.

And so what they're really seeking is not work or leisure, but a new balance between the two.

Kind of a new portfolio activities and involves more time to play and also some time to work both to keep some of the money coming in.

Good idea, and also for the stimulation and the challenge.

Occasionally people will say to me, well, if we're gonna be living longer and in our later years be involved in a kind of a flex work or flex retirement model, what are some good examples?

And people often will go to mentors in corporations.

But I think the best example was the Rolling Stones.

You know, here they are in their seventies and they worked for a while and then they stop working and then they come back together again and hit it hard.

And I think more and more, you're gonna see people floating in and out of work in their later years and that will become the normal.

Another interesting variable to all of this.

When we enter into our third age and if we find ourselves is empty nesters and then either full or partial retirees all of a sudden we've got a lots of that time affluence I mentioned earlier.

In fact, the boomer generation over the next 20 years is gonna have two and a half trillion hours of free time to fill.

That has never happened before, there's nothing about this that's ever occurred on our planet before.

There have always been certain groups in certain cultures, the elite groups that might've had more leisure time but the idea of a real normal people, neighborhood people, not just, you know, successful people, but everybody having more time affluence and what we will make of that becomes a fascinating new challenge.

I often hear people using this phrase bucket list and I got to, I don't like it.

How come I don't like it?

Because it's all geared to the idea you're about to kick the bucket and right before you do, here's some things you ought to get done.

It's sort of a morbid motivation.

What do I like better?

I like the idea of peak experiences.

The wonderful thing about peak experiences is that it could be different for everyone in different times in your life.

For example, for someone it might come from jumping around in a jungle somewhere, someone else it could be watching a sunrise with a grandchild you love.

Another person it could be reading a book that captures your imagination, another person going to a rock concert, there is no one size that fits all.

So while we're thinking about how much do we need to save for our longer life and how do we stay healthy and fit?

There's another big question which is how do you have the most enjoyable time of it?

And so who can we talk to?

What books can we read?

Or how do we find how to have fun again?

And I want to make a personal comment here.

So when our kids left the house we decided we're gonna try and have more fun because being an empty nester, you know, you kinda missed the, the action of your kids and their friends.

And what I realized was I didn't remember how to have fun anymore.

You know, so you go into the automatics, well let's have a drink or let's go to a fun comedy show or something.

And yeah that's fine, but learning how to be free again, learning how to have fun with something simple, remembering how to laugh, all valuable elements of life that we ought to probably go back to school on, not necessarily as formal school, but go back to work on trying to figure out how to do once again in our later years.

[upbeat music] Family, family, family, family, family, family, boy in life's third age, rather than it becoming less important family becomes more important.

But there's some new twist to the idea of family.

A while back, I saw this picture in the New York Times and I was stunned by what I was looking at.

Okay, so there's a little guy in the center, that's Bradley and he's three.

And right next to him is his mom, Kristina she's 27.

All right but then standing right next to Kristina is her mother Kathy, who was little Bradley's grandmother and she's 49.

The next to Kathy is the great grandfather Bob and he's 73.

But wait a minute, there's kitty who's 95.

She's the great, great grandmother.

And well we're not done yet, because there is a great, great, great grandmother, Sarah Knauss sitting there as well and she's 118 years old.

What's you're looking at is the future.

This is the sixth generation family.

Today it's extraordinary, but soon it may become commonplace.

Often in America and other parts of the world, we talk about young and old.

You know, that's very 20th century, the 21st century we're looking at six generations alive at the same time.

How do we relate as family as we get older?

Well, maybe it's because of health crises or maybe it's because of the economy or maybe it's because we love each other, our families are all entangled in wonderful ways.

So I've often heard people say, Oh it's sorta like we're gonna have sandwich generations and I think whoa, no, it's a lot more interesting than that.

I actually feel it's becoming sorta like a cube.

So for example here's a family where you got a gal named Karen, she's in the middle.

She's 52 and she's doing fine but her daughter and her grandchild just moved back home because the daughter's marriage dissolved.

Okay, so now she's not only living her own life but she's now concerned for overseeing the life of her daughter and grandchild.

And she's got a son who let's just say is not being all he can be.

The other end of the continuum, her parents are getting older and she's become involved in trying to sort her way through their finances and their Medicare and all their various decisions they're making about how to live independently.

And she's got a mother-in-law who's in a nursing home and she's paying the bills.

Her husband works in construction.

His work's been a little more volatile and her sister is doing fine but they're all worried about the family.

And I bet that your family resembles this one and therefore living in life's third age is not a solo project.

So we're all coming to realize that wow, with this longer life and six generation families emerging, there's all sorts of interconnections and interdependencies and fun to be had between grandchildren and their grandparents and brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, and one of them has to do with finance.

What I'm taking note of is the enormous amount of money being spent by retirees and pre-retirees for their adult children.

And I think they're doing it because they care about their kids and they want their kids to live well.

So for example, last year, the average near retiree or retiree, so people in that kind of their fifties and sixties contributed $500 billion to subsidizing their adult children.

Maybe it's all pay your phone bills, maybe it's all cover your health insurance, maybe it's all by you a new car, maybe it's all cover part of your rent, maybe it's I'll put you through college all very generous, very kind hearted, but that's twice as much as that same group is devoting to their own retirement savings.

So becoming the family bank reflects a certain generosity.

What I've seen is that we Americans really don't wanna turn our back on our brothers or sisters or our kids or our parents, but we may be doing so at the jeopardy of our own financial wellbeing in our later years.

That could be a problem downstream because if we don't create reasonable boundaries, we're gonna wind up being a burden on our family, which I've heard in focus group after focus group is the very thing that people don't want to have happen in their third age.

One of the challenges of living a long life or having our moms and dads or loved ones live long lives where our health spans don't match our lifespans is that there are many older people who are struggling with challenges.

Maybe cognitive Alzheimer's brain challenges or they've come back from a difficult disease and loved ones are providing help and support as caregivers.

There are currently over 40 million informal caregivers in United States.

Let me show you an ad done a few years ago that I thought really sensitively portrayed the honorable role of being a caregiver.

- Good morning sir, ready to get up?

Let me get your feet out.

How are you doing today?

- I'm okay.

- Good morning.

I remember always looking at my dad's arms like when I was like eight, nine, 10 years old.

He had arms like pop bite.

He was a tugboat captain and I so admired his physique.

And now it's a different story, you know?

And that's just the way it is.

So my dad had a stroke and now he can't get around, and he can't walk and he needs me to help him out.

And my son, Luke and I have been doing it.

And I do anything, anything for him.

I can give you a really good mohan.

You look like a punk rocker.

There's a definite role reversal that happens.

I have to wake them up in the morning and take care of him, groom him and shave them and shower him.

It's actually an honor to do that for your father, because he did it to me when I was a kid.

You know, it takes me like a half an hour to shave my father because I have to be so careful.

- Careful with that razor.

- Okay I will, I will, I will, I will.

There we go.

Okay good, now that face.

Hi.

I'm one of the lucky ones, a lot of my friends my age do not have their dads and I still have my dad.

He always says to me, he looks up at me after I pour love on him for the whole day and he says, I don't know what I did to deserve you and I say, dad I got you.

I got you, dad.

[soft music] - There's another dimension to family in the third age, and that is, are we simply a family if we're related by blood?

More and more we're hearing people say that they want a family of choice.

That they may have neighbors or friends or people they care about who they think about like family.

So maybe it's time we began thinking about being less independent and seeing if we had a little more interdependence in our lives, we could all be looking after each other a little bit better and sharing the costs.

What's the big question.

How do I have the best relationships with my family?

And how do I make sure that I'm being supported by them when I need it?

And I'm supporting my loved ones when they need it without us putting ourselves in jeopardy.

Big questions regarding family in life's third age.

All right, so now let's turn the corner into money and how are we gonna fund our longer life?

And let me make a clear point about this.

Again, I'll go back to my grandparents' era.

They didn't have a lot of concern about well how they were going to pay for their 80th year of life, because they didn't imagine they were gonna live that long.

Plus keep in mind that previous generations to ours, having grown up in the shadow of the depression were very frugal and so they grew up believing that you should save for a rainy day.

Most boomers, for example, my own generation we grew up in a time of prosperity.

We never thought there would ever be a rainy day.

On top of that up until a few decades ago most benefits if you got them from your employer were guaranteed for life but now a lot of those benefits are kind of on you to take action on and maybe have your employer match.

So let's think about all this for a few moments.

So we've done studies and we've asked people what are your top financial worries for the years ahead?

What if I or my loved one have a costly health issue?

Most people haven't really contemplated the cost of out-of-pocket health care and long-term care which about 70% of us will need long-term care at some point in our lives but we don't wanna think about it or plan for it.

People are also worried about the rising cost of goods and products and services and that's because of inflation.

Yes, you can project though into the future to see if you have a dollar today, what it might be worth 20 years from now and make sure you've got the resources to cover the life you're hoping to live then.

People are really worried that they're gonna run out of money before the end of their days and so more and more we're hearing people talk about making sure they've got a big enough nest egg or maybe they need a paycheck for life or some sort of a a pension supplement or some sort of social security plus so that they can be sure that they've got money coming in for all their days.

Here's a surprise, with our longer lives and with more of the responsibility for having the resources to go the full distance, you'd think we'd be pretty smart and pretty prepared.

Yikes 81% of Americans say they don't have any idea how much money they're gonna need to fund their retirement.

I don't know how long I'm gonna live or I don't know I'll be healthy or sick, or I don't know if I'll be caregiving a loved one and yeah, those are definitely unknowns but you can still create kind of scenarios or examples of the life you probably be living so you can make sure you know what's needed and you're taking the steps necessary to plan or to make some course corrections and I'm gonna get to a few in a moment so that you can be sure to have the resources you need to last a lifetime.

So let me be a little bit critical of my own generation.

And then I'm gonna give you a little science fiction idea.

So I grew up in sort of the be here now era and a lot of the psychological, oh, I don't know self-improvement in our lives has been focused on don't be so trippy about the past, you know, it's over and don't be so worried about the future be here now.

So I think that being here now is a great way to approach life from a psychological point of view, but from a financial point of view, it can be a disaster.

Here's why and let me go science fictional.

Right here today there's me and there's my wife and there's my kids.

And so I wanna make sure that we have a good life for today.

So let's say I make some money and here's my money.

And I decide, okay, we wanna be comfortable this year, we wanna have nice clothes, we want to have a okay car, we want to pay off our bills today.

And I take all the money I'm making now and I make sure my current me is secure.

But then there's a future me 20 years from now.

And that future me probably won't be working but is gonna be reliant on the money I put aside back in the now.

So if I take the money I'm making today and spend it all and put nothing in a kind of a lockbox for the future me, by the time I get to be in my later years, I'm gonna be broke.

And I'm gonna turn back to me and say, what were you thinking?

Why wouldn't you putting some money and resources aside so that not only the here and now version of you but the there then version of you could be living well too.

And that's partly how we have to think about it.

We are responsible not only for this year but we're responsible for our later years too.

The good news is that whenever you are in your life, you might be 51, you might be 93, you might be 32, when it comes to financial resources, there's always a lot of choices that sometimes are not even obvious.

So let me mentioned a few.

Many people are deciding that they can trade out their house, they can relocate.

Maybe they've paid off their mortgage, by the way over 70% of people over 65 in America, get a load of this, own their homes, 60% of which are paid off.

So some people are thinking well, maybe there's some kind of reverse mortgage, if it's trustworthy, that I can look into, or maybe I should sell that house and downsize, maybe I can even rent.

People saying, well, yeah, and I relocate to a less expensive neighborhood, maybe also to be near to the kids or grandkids, my money will go further.

Other people are realizing that, hey, it's not a punishment at all but maybe a wise thing to do is to work a bit longer.

Even if it's part-time, even if it's at lesser fees than you might've earned during the peak of your career, the ability to have some extra cash and to not cut into your nest egg for a few years, can give you a much more secure long life.

Another example I mentioned that earlier sharing economy.

You know over the age of 75, about 40% of women in America live alone and that's social isolation can be both very difficult psychologically, it's also really expensive.

So the idea communality or living with friends or sharing.

Big question on a lot of people's minds will I have enough money to live my dreams with peace of mind?

And the answer is probably but you can think about some choices and some changes you can make to give you more peace of mind.

So we have arrived at the last chapter in this program.

And in many ways I'm gonna say the most important.

For many years being a spokesperson and an activist in this subject, I'd hear people talking about how to live to be a hundred and how much money you're gonna need to live to be 90 and where are you gonna put your home and how do you redecorate?

And I thought, you know like why, what's the purpose of living into one's third age?

What's the idea of being an 80 or a 90 year old?

And honestly I was troubled because I know the statistics last year the average retiring America watched 48 hours of television a week.

So let's stop and think not only sort of existentially and socially, but you personally, what is your purpose?

What will be your purpose in life's third age?

And if you're not sure about what it is, that's okay but let's take a few moments to think about it.

Many people say the new frontier is new tech.

You know what amazing app or new tech is gonna arrive to make our lives better?

I got to tell you, I think the new frontier is maturity, it's longevity, it's life's third age, and it's totally uncharted.

I was taken a couple of years ago by the conservative writer for the New York Times, David Brooks.

He gave a talk and he wrote a piece about your two resumes.

And I thought, well, what does he mean by that?

And he explained, we're all gonna have a career resume.

What was your job?

How much money did you make?

What kind of title did you have?

Maybe even some description of your possessions.

You know, you have a house and a car and blah, blah, blah.

And he says, you know what, nobody's gonna care about that.

But you're also gonna have a eulogy resume and that's gonna be who you were as a person and how people felt about you and whether yours was a life well lived.

And when I heard this, I thought you know, the eulogy resume is the one that really matters and we pay too little attention to that.

And also what David Brooks suggested was that if you find yourself at a period of your life, where you're thinking about how you're living and who you are as a person, and it seems not substantial enough or not careful enough, or frankly not caring enough or not resilient enough, then maybe there's still time in your maturity to develop yourself in a more grand way and in a more important way and a more contributing way and frankly, in a more empathetic way so that your eulogy resume becomes what you'd like it to be.

So let's build on this.

I had an experience about 20 years ago, where I was asked by President Carter, if I would work with him on a book which came to be called "The Virtues of Aging".

And as part of that, my wife and I worked with the president and Mrs. Carter on a habitat build with, I guess there were 4,000 of us and we built a hundred houses in five days.

And I have to tell you that we showed up in Houston, Texas the first morning at 6:00 A.M. and it was hot.

And I'm watching this president, he was way older than me hammering, sawing, cutting, holding, cheering everybody on and by the way he didn't stop, day after day after day, we built houses.

And I have to tell you, most of the people on the builds were older people, out in the blazing sun and I would ask people, why are you here?

They were here because they said they felt better when they were giving to others.

A couple of years later I had a book coming out called "The Power Years".

And right before it was due to launch, a Katrina, the Katrina storms began in New Orleans and it was horrible and all press tours and all media were just canceled.

So I thought, wow, that book I'd worked so hard on and my favorite chapter in that book was called leaving a legacy.

And I thought, you know, one day I'd like to be judged by my kids for not what I said, but what I did.

So I decided to call up Habitat for Humanity having had such a positive experience a couple of years before, and I spoke to Jonathan Reckford, the director, and I said, Jonathan I wanna take all the future earnings from this book and donate them to Habitat for the rebuild of New Orleans.

And he said to me, thank you, Ken, it's very kind of you.

And he says you know, a lot of people your age, I was getting close to being in my mid fifties and sort of middle essence, he said a lot of people your age are going through what you're going through now.

And I said, really, what do you mean?

What is that?

And he says, you know you've got that knowing feeling.

What knowing feeling?

And he says, you know, you're trying to make the transition from success to significance.

And he was right.

I think that one of the challenges if we're gonna live a long life is how do we rise to our highest level and be our best self in our later years.

In a recent Age Wave study 89% of Americans feel that there should be more ways for retirees to use their talents and knowledge for the benefit of their communities and societies at large.

Our personal need to make something more of ourselves than just a retired person and our communities could sure use our wisdom, our perspective, our emotional intelligence and our resilience.

But there's also an intimate side of legacy and giving and that is what about within our families?

Well, we've looked at that in our Age Wave research.

And so we asked people what's the most important give back in terms of legacy and end of life sharing?

And here's what we learned.

People said financial assets and real estate, boy, that really mattered.

You know, if you've got a little bit of money, a little bit of property to pass it to your kids or your grandkids, that they can get a little benefit from that, that's really important.

But more important than that were possessions of emotional value.

And I thought, wow, that's kind of interesting.

How does that work?

And there had been a study at the university of Minnesota called Who Gets Grandma's Yellow Pie Plate?

And it said it all, but more important even than that were instructions and wishes to be fulfilled.

What we see now is that there are documents, that's your end of life decisions, your medical care decisions, your wills and it's astonishing how half of the American public dies without a will, astonishing because it means that you're gonna leave a kind of a mess for your family.

And so I don't mean to get heavy handed here but thinking about these things as part of the grace of your life, as part of your maturity in your third age to pass it along.

Let me give you an example for my personal life.

My mom and dad were kind of hardworking folks and lived in Newark, New Jersey ultimately moved to Florida.

Before they passed away they had been married 71 years.

However, my dad became blind his last decade from macular degeneration and it did not make him a happy guy.

And our dear sweet, beautiful mom was decimated for 12 years by Alzheimer's disease.

And so our dad, he asked my brother and I, if we would come and spend the day with him in Florida and just talk about the end of his life.

And we said, oh dad, we don't wanna talk about that creepy subject, blah, blah, blah, you'll live forever.

You know, the things we all say, but he said, no, I insist.

And so we spent the day with our dad walking and sitting and talking and we went through all of his instructions and wishes about our mom, about us, about my kids and we promised him we would handle those things and we did.

By the way, we would have done those things anyhow, just because we loved our mom and our family so much.

But I got to tell you, I had a lot of respect for my dad and he handled his business and how he made it be clear to us what mattered to him and wanted the peace of mind knowing that we were going to respect that.

But even more important to people in their third age, people want their values and life lessons passed on.

What do you believe?

What are the stories that matter to you?

What are the values and the decisions that will have to be made in life that you've learned from in your own life that you want to be sure you have passed to your heirs and even those who may never even know you because there'll be generations from now.

There's a phrase in Africa that when an elder dies, it's like a library burning down.

And so if we're going to allow the third age members of our family, the 60 year olds, 80 year olds and 90 year olds to make sure their library has not burned down, we need to take the time to take out our recording devices or our cell phones or anything we have and allow them to tell some of the most important lessons and stories from their life.

It's up to them to be willing to share them and it's up to us to ask for it.

Back when I was in my twenties and that's like a long time ago, that was right after the dinosaurs died.

My grandmother had lost her husband, our granddad, and I flew to New Jersey for a week with a reel to reel black and white video recorder and I interviewed my grandmother so that I would have her stories in life.

And here's a little clip from those exchanges.

- All right, first of all, how old are you?

- Well that I would know.

- How come?

Because when I was born my mother had passed away and there was no record of me.

- Would you figure you're over 60?

- Oh yes.

- Figure you're over 70?

- Oh yes.

- Figure you're 80?

- That I don't know, around that age I think.

I was in the orphan asylum at Elizabeth.

I don't know how long I was there, I stayed there quite some time and then when I got a little older, I, whoever took me here and I brought it with them.

- How old were you then?

Were you were very little?

- Oh, I was is a little girl yet.

In my bare feet, half the time we didn't have no shoes.

We had no electric lights, we used to burn kerosene lamps and there was no bathtub and the bathroom was about a block away from the house.

You had to use the lantern and to go out there at night.

- If there's a kind of message you like for all of us children and grandchildren to live on later on 20, 50 years from now, what do you want us to learn from you that we can continue doing?

- To be good, honest, respectable, and live happy with your families like I lived happy with my husband.

- You're a sweetie Clara.

- That's enough?

- For now we've got a few more things to do.

Why do you think we're doing this?

- I don't know you because you want to remember me and you like me, right?

- That's right.

- That you love me.

- And I love you too, from the minute you were born I loved you and find a nice girl and get married, now love your devil.

- My grandmother was pretty spectacular.

Let me share with you one other piece to this puzzle.

What we need is a massive movement worldwide where elders are invited into the game, there are bridge ways and pathways created for men and women of years to give in their communities, to teach in the schools, to help the young people to be better versions of themselves going forward.

If we're gonna live 60, 80, 90, a hundred years, the idea of our third age is not simply to be useful longer.

It's not simply to be able to work longer, it's not simply being able to have more fun and peak experiences, it's about giving back.

It's about using our maturity to be generative.

It's an Erickson phrase.

It means sharing of your life, replanting the seeds of your life into future generations.

And I worry that today there are too many people in my stage of life who are concerned for their own security and their own wellbeing and not devoting enough of their time and resources to making sure that younger people or even future generations have a planet and have communities and have a nation and have lives that are abundant and they're filled with opportunity for the pursuit of happiness.

And so what I like to have you contemplate when you add all of this together is what are you going to do to make the most of your longevity?

Where are you gonna spend your longevity bonus?

How will you form the greatest connections and relationships with your family or of blood relatives and your family of choice?

How can you make sure you've got the money to go the distance?

How can you keep as healthy as you can possibly be?

And that might mean exercising more and eating a little healthier than we're all doing right now.

And most importantly, how can you establish a new purpose for you in these later years that in many ways will represent the best of who you are.

I wish you all the best on this journey.

[upbeat music] Every day, 10,000 Americans become eligible for retirement.

Despite having saved for retirement, most worry they won't have enough money to cover their expenses, especially during these uncertain times.

If you're concerned there's a gap between the income you'll need and what you have, you can find out how adding an annuity to your retirement portfolio might help.

For more, go to protectedincome.org.

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