Historical data from the Center for Disease Control shows that between 1950 and 2010, a period of just 60 years, life expectancy in the United States increased by approximately five years, 4.9 years for males and 4.3 years for females.
This is important as it is expected, due to advances in health care, that these longevity trends could continue. Advances in studying the human genome, stem cell therapy, and 3-D printing are expected to have significant impacts on the pace of additional longevity gains. Stem cell therapy and treatments used to be extremely controversial as they typically harvested embryonic stem cells. However, today, researchers have been able to harvest stem cells from a persons own abdominal body fat to help regrow skin. The results have been extremely encouraging, and medical researchers believe that this process will be able to be used with other organs in the future.
If longevity continues to improve, today's 35 years old could expect to live much longer than their parents or grandparents did. For each additional year of life, people need to accumulate the income and asset resources to be able to maintain standard of living for those additional years. This is a subject we will explore further in a future market commentary. We pay a lot of attention to these issues as they are critical to help clients successfully accumulate the resources to be able to "Move Life Forward" in a meaningful way.