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Will I outlive my money?
Not if your plan is built around the real question: how long could you live, not how long you're likely to. At 65, half of all couples still have a spouse alive at 92. Anchor your essential expenses to guaranteed income and the guesswork disappears — you don't have to predict your own lifespan to know you're covered.
Key takeaways
- "Average life expectancy" describes the middle of a range — by definition, half of retirees live longer than it.
- At 65, the average man has about 18 more years and the average woman about 21 — but for a married couple, there's a 50% chance one spouse is still alive at 92.
- A withdrawal plan built around an average lifespan is, by design, wrong for half the people who use it.
- Guaranteed income — Social Security plus any contract-guaranteed lifetime income — shifts the risk of living a long time off your plan and onto the entities built to carry it.
- The fix isn't guessing your own expiration date. It's sizing an income floor to your essential expenses so the question stops being one you have to answer alone.
Isn’t “average life expectancy” the number I should plan around?
No — an average describes the middle of a range, and half of everyone lands on the far side of it.
At 65, the average American man has about 18 more years ahead of him — to roughly 83. The average woman has about 21 more — to roughly 86. Those are real, current numbers from the CDC. They are also, by definition, the halfway point. Half of 65-year-old men live past 83. Half of 65-year-old women live past 86.
A retirement plan built to run out at the average isn’t a plan. It’s a coin flip.
What does that actually mean for a married couple?
It gets bigger, not smaller.
You’re not planning around one lifespan — you’re planning around whichever spouse lives longer, and that number pushes further out than most people expect. For a couple who are both 65 today, actuarial research from the Society of Actuaries puts the odds at better than even — about 50% — that at least one of you is still alive at 92. Roughly three in ten couples have a spouse who lives past 92 by ten years or more.
That’s not a scare number. It’s the actual planning horizon for a lot of couples reading this, whether the math feels comfortable or not.
So how do I actually plan around a number I can’t know in advance?
You stop trying to guess it, and you stop needing to.
The honest fix is to separate your expenses into two categories: what has to get paid no matter what — housing, food, healthcare, the non-negotiables — and everything else. Then you cover the first category with income that’s guaranteed to keep arriving for as long as you’re alive: Social Security, any pension, and contract-guaranteed lifetime income from an annuity, if that’s part of your plan.
Once your essential expenses are covered by income that can’t run out, “will I outlive my money” stops being a question you have to solve with a spreadsheet and a guess about your own health. The longevity risk moves to where it belongs — onto the government, for Social Security, and onto the insurance company, for any contract-guaranteed income, both of which are built to carry that risk across large pools of people. You’re not betting on your own lifespan anymore. You’ve made it someone else’s math to worry about.
This is the difference between a dollar answer and a probability. A withdrawal-rate rule tells you the odds your money lasts 30 years. An income floor tells you, in dollars, that your bills are covered — for however long you actually live.
Does this mean I need to annuitize everything I own?
No. It means the essential-expense slice of your plan gets the guarantee, and the rest keeps doing its job.
The money funding your income floor isn’t idle just because it’s protected — it’s working, every bit as hard as the growth side of your portfolio, just at a different job: making sure the lights stay on. That frees the rest of what you’ve built to stay invested for growth, without the pressure of needing to sell into a bad market just to cover this month’s expenses.
What’s the first real step?
Add up what your life actually costs — the essentials, not the wish list. Add up what Social Security and any pension already guarantee you, for life. The gap between those two numbers is the part of your plan that needs a real answer, not an average.
That’s a conversation, not a form. If you want a clear look at where your own numbers land, that’s exactly what a retirement income plan is built to show you.
Sources
Eli Mitcham
Investment Adviser Representative · Asset Lift Wealth Management
Eli has helped conservative investors protect their retirement income since 1999, guiding clients through two of the worst bear markets in a century. More about Eli →