How long do you have left?

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Ming the Merciless

There is no mercy
Location
Inside my skull

Depends on that asteroid this weekend.
 

welsh dragon

Thanks but no thanks. I think I'll pass.
Apparently I can expect to live to be 92. Not bad. My mum will be 99 next month and is very healthy apart from the aches and pains that anyone of that age has, she still has all her marbles as well, so maybe i will live to be as old as my mum.

Screenshot_20200910-205911_DuckDuckGo.jpg
 

classic33

Leg End Member
Only two more years left!
Too late to start drinking?
IMG_20200910_213343.jpg
 

srw

It's a bit more complicated than that...
Ignoring the fact that it's based on US data,which is only indirectly relevant for a country with socialised medicine, the estimates are probably pretty reasonable. I happen to know the assumptions my pension fund uses, and they're pretty consistent with the result I get from the estimator.

With some reasonably standard estimation techniques and assumptions that aren't too heroic it's pretty straightforward* to get estimates which are OK at population level. But you've almost all fallen for the marketing technique which prints one number bigger than all the rest. Life expectancy, for an individual, isn't all that helpful. @dave r has spotted the important information - which is that your estimated life expectancy is subject to monumental uncertainty.

My best guess is that that blue bar is a 50 percentile distribution. There's a 75% chance you'll live to the lowest age on the bar, and a 25% chance that you'll live longer. Which means that if @dave r placed a bet on dying sometime before 82 or after 95 he'd still lose about half the time.

*Or at least it was, until this year - you might have noticed something happening which has completely buggered up all the data.

It's overestimating because they're trying to sell you pension plans.
Interesting, but wrong. They're certainly trying to sell you pension plans - and the wide range of uncertainty illustrated shows why guaranteed income pension plans are actually a decent risk transfer for a lot of people (although they're historically very expensive at the moment). In general people underestimate how long they'll live and how expensive the last few years of life will be - so unless you're particularly looking forward to dying in penury, or have rich relatives who will be willing to pay for your few years of intensive personal care it makes sense to have some kind of guaranteed income to rely on.
When I was a lad, I used to read the Wizard. One article was a prediction that by the year 2050, the average life expectancy would be 100.

As somebody who was born in 1950, I've always believed that prediction.
It's probably turned out not to be too bad a prediction. For people born in 2050, life expectancy at birth in the rich parts of the world could well be approaching 100 - or even more if we manage to cure one or more of the dread diseases. I'm afraid that'll be far too late for all of us.
 
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