{"id":239427,"date":"2018-04-22T01:06:50","date_gmt":"2018-04-21T23:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=239427"},"modified":"2018-04-22T06:43:01","modified_gmt":"2018-04-22T04:43:01","slug":"the-rich-are-betting-they-can-buy-their-way-to-a-longer-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wealth\/239427\/the-rich-are-betting-they-can-buy-their-way-to-a-longer-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The rich are betting they can buy their way to a longer life"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Money might not buy love, but it can buy better health. And, to live as long as possible, the world\u2019s wealthy\u00a0are willing to pay up.<\/p>\n

Over the past few decades, the average person\u2019s lifespan\u00a0has risen almost everywhere in the world.<\/p>\n

In China, the US and most of Eastern Europe, the average life expectancy at birth has reached the late 70s, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD. People in Western Europe and\u00a0Japan, meanwhile, can expect to live into their early 80s.<\/p>\n

Most rich\u00a0people, however, are counting on living even longer-a lot longer, as in two decades more than\u00a0average.<\/p>\n

In a new UBS Financial Services survey, 53% of wealthy investors said they expected to live to 100.<\/p>\n

Hitting triple digits won\u2019t be easy, but it\u2019s not as outlandish as it used to be. The average Japanese woman now has a life expectancy of 87, OECD data show, compared with 81\u00a0years for men. And many studies have shown that the wealthy have a built-in longevity advantage.<\/p>\n

In the US, for example, the richest 1% of American women by income live more than 10 years longer than the poorest 1%, a 2016 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found. For men, the gap between the richest and poorest Americans is almost 15 years.<\/p>\n

The rich also seem to know that living to 100 is a pricey prospect, one that requires more spending on health care, better food, exercise and other services that can lengthen life. Also, you have to keep paying for everything that comes from hanging around additional decades.<\/p>\n

In the UBS survey, which focused on people with more than $1 million in investable assets,\u00a091% said they\u2019re \u201cmaking financial changes due to increased life expectancy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the wealthy worry about rising health-care costs, the survey suggests.<\/p>\n

The rich are more than willing to sacrifice money for extra longevity. Nine of 10 wealthy people agreed that \u201chealth is more important than wealth.\u201d Asked by UBS how much of their fortune they\u2019d be willing to give up \u201cto guarantee an extra 10 years of healthy life,\u201d the average responses varied by wealth level.<\/p>\n

Investors who are barely millionaires,\u00a0with $1 million to $2 million in net worth, were willing to give up a third of their nest egg for\u00a0an additional decade of life.\u00a0Investors with more than $50 million were willing to part with almost half of their fortune.<\/p>\n

The world\u2019s trend toward longer life has featured an exception in recent years – the US. The life expectancy of Americans has declined for two years in a row, an anomaly that can be blamed in part on the\u00a0country\u2019s opioid abuse crisis. But even before U.S. lifespans started slipping because of drug use, health and longevity statistics\u00a0significantly lagged those of\u00a0other wealthy countries in Western Europe and Asia.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s not surprising,\u00a0then, that rich Americans surveyed by UBS had different attitudes from the wealthy elsewhere in the world\u2014they were more pessimistic about making it to age 100.<\/p>\n

Just 30% of the American rich expect to hit the century mark. While they were the most worried about rising health-care costs, they were the least likely to be adjusting their finances for the prospect of\u00a0living longer.<\/p>\n

If rich Americans aren\u2019t planning for the extra costs of longevity, they could be making a mistake.\u00a0Studies show that the wealthy in the US are increasingly insulated from the\u00a0depressing health trends afflicting most Americans.<\/p>\n

A\u00a02016 study by University of California at Berkeley professors Emmanuel\u00a0Saez\u00a0and\u00a0Gabriel Zucman\u00a0compared the death rates for American men aged\u00a065 to 79 across several decades by wealth. If these men\u2019s wealth placed them in the top 1%, their\u00a0mortality rates in the early 1980s\u00a0were 12% lower than average.<\/p>\n

Twenty-five years later, the wealthiest\u00a0American men\u2019s death rates had plunged\u00a0to 40% below\u00a0average.<\/p>\n

Rising inequality is about more than just a widening gap in wealth and income. The richest Americans are also living much longer, healthier lives than everyone else.<\/p>\n

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Read: How the world\u2019s ultra-rich invest their money \u2013 including a surge in Bitcoin<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Money might not buy love, but it can buy better health. And, to live as long as possible, the world\u2019s wealthy are willing to pay up. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":103689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9880],"tags":[13013],"class_list":["post-239427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wealth","tag-ubs-financial-services"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239431,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239427\/revisions\/239431"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}