For most of my working life I watched one number on the statement. The balance.
I would add it up at the kitchen table and feel either fine or terrible. It took me until my sixties to see that the balance answers the wrong question.
The federal health statisticians put the answer to the right question in plain view. A 65-year-old in 2024 could expect to live another 19.7 years.
For men it was 18.4 years. For women it was 20.8. Those are averages, so plenty of us will run longer.
That is your read for this afternoon. Every dollar you saved has to cover one of those years.
Twenty years is long enough to watch a dollar shrink. The government’s own price index shows how far.
Set a dollar from 2006 against what it buys today.
$1.00
a dollar’s buying power in 2006, measured by the consumer price index
60 cents
what that same dollar buys in August 2026
That is about two decades of ordinary inflation, roughly the length of a retirement that starts at 65. No crisis was needed to get there.
So the useful question changes. Ask it the plain way. How many years does each dollar have to cover, and what will it buy in the last one?
A balance of any size looks different through that question. The pressure builds slowly and shows up around year fifteen, when prices have kept climbing and the account has kept shrinking.
That is longevity in dollars and cents. The good news of a longer life arrives with a longer bill attached.
Where the cohort’s money sits this quarter, and how many years each aisle has to be paid for.
One industry sells straight into that question. It is the insurer that turns a lump sum into a paycheck for life.
Americans bought $461.3 billion of annuities in 2025, a fourth straight record year. An annuity is a contract with an insurer, paid for up front or over time, that can pay out income later.
Only about 4% of that money went into plain income annuities, the kind that simply turn a lump sum into a paycheck. The rest went into versions built to grow the money with some protection.
The limit sits in the contract. Most lifetime checks pay a level amount, so the same shrinking dollar arrives every month.
An insurer can add a raise every year, and that raise is priced into a smaller first check. The money is also tied up, and the promise is only as good as the company behind it.
The arithmetic
Life expectancy at 65 in 2024: 19.7 years for the total population, 18.4 for men, 20.8 for women. Source: CDC National Center for Health Statistics, Mortality in the United States, 2024, as reported in 2025. Buying power: CPI-U (not seasonally adjusted), Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED, series CPIAUCNS: 2006 annual average 201.592, August 2026 334.980. 201.592 / 334.980 = 0.602, so $1.00 of 2006 buying power, or a 2006 dollar, buys about 60 cents of goods at August 2026 prices, Boomers Trade’s own arithmetic. Annuity sales: LIMRA, U.S. Individual Annuity Sales Survey, preliminary 2025 results (February 2026): total $461.3 billion, the fourth straight record year; single premium immediate annuities $14 billion and deferred income annuities $4.8 billion. (14 + 4.8) / 461.3 = 0.041, about 4%, Boomers Trade’s own arithmetic. Years one and fifteen are illustrations.
LIMRA puts out its third-quarter annuity numbers later this month. Skip the headline total and find the small line for plain lifetime income. If that line starts to grow, the cohort has started asking the right question.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
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