In 2025, the MIT AgeLab and Manulife John Hancock did something no one had done
before. They measured how prepared Americans are for the longer lives most of us will now live.
The country scored 60 out of 100. A barely passing grade.
What makes the score notable is not the number itself, but what the number measures.
The Longevity Preparedness Index assesses readiness across eight separate life
domains, only two of which are the ones the financial industry typically discusses. The
other six are where the gaps between life and plan tend to open up.
For families and business owners with serious assets in motion, the implication is direct.
The plan still works on paper, but the person it was written for may be harder to predict
than the plan assumed.
Three years ago, we wrote about a related framework from the MIT AgeLab and the idea that the years past 65 may comprise an 8,000-day chapter. That’s twenty-plus years that may rival the working years in length and that deserve their own deliberate
planning.
The Longevity Preparedness Index is what happens when that idea gets measured.
Eight Domains, Not Two
Most of the conversation about longevity planning lives in two distinct domains of health
and finance. Under this framing, longevity planning comes down to staying healthy and
saving enough. The LPI argues, using data, that this framing is incomplete.
The Index assesses preparedness across eight domains:
- Health
- Finance
- Care
- Community
- Daily Activities
- Home
- Life Transitions
- Social Connection
The first two get the marketing attention. The other six are the ones the data says we are most under-prepared for.
Life Transitions: The Domain Closest to Comprehensive Planning
Of the eight domains, the one closest to comprehensive financial planning, and the one most often missed by the plan itself, is Life Transitions.
Life Transitions covers the major shifts in later life, such as retirement from paid work, the assumption or surrender of caregiving roles, business succession, the loss of a spouse, and end-of-life decisions. None of these are financial events, but each is a potential source of interference with the plan that was supposed to support a financial future.
A succession plan built when the founder was 60 may need a different shape if that founder remains active at 85. A trust structured to support a surviving spouse for ten years may need different funding if the support window is closer to twenty. A wealth transfer designed to reach the next generation may arrive when that generation is already in their own retirement, with planning needs of their own.
Life Transitions is the domain where the financial plan and the life it was built for can drift apart.
The Health Domain Carries More Weight Than It Looks
The Health domain may seem like the part of the LPI a financial planner can defer to a doctor. It is not. At age 85, roughly one in three Americans will have Alzheimer’s Disease. The 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia concluded that nearly half of all such cases are potentially preventable through fourteen modifiable risk factors. Sleep is woven through the prevention strategy.
We covered it specifically in an earlier piece. At the time, we framed it as a quality-of-life issue. The framing is now sharper.
The choices that affect cognitive trajectory are also the choices that affect whether the financial plan retains the decision-maker it was built around. A plan that assumes its principal will remain capable of consequential decisions at 85 makes an assumption the data does not fully support.
This is not a counsel of despair. The risk factors that matter most are largely within practical reach. Therefore, we like to think of this as a counsel of stress-testing.
Three Questions a Good Plan Should Now Be Able to Answer
The LPI is most useful when it sharpens the questions a family or business owner asks of their existing plan. Three are worth asking now.
First: who makes decisions if cognitive capacity changes?
The answer is not “we will figure it out then.” Powers of attorney, trustee succession provisions, and corporate governance documents may all need to be reviewed against a longer and less predictable cognitive horizon.
Second: does the business succession timeline still match the founder’s likely trajectory?
A succession structured around a founder retiring at 70 may need a different shape if the founder remains engaged into their 80s, or if the character of their engagement changes before they expect it to.
Third: does the plan account for the next generation’s own longevity?
Wealth designed to land at age 65 may arrive at age 75. The next generation’s own plan may need to absorb a transfer they did not finance their lives expecting to receive late.
These are not exotic scenarios. They are the scenarios the LPI data suggests are now central.
What Good Planning Looks Like Now
As we discussed above, for most of the modern history of financial planning, comprehensive has meant coordinated work across the two domains of health and finance. The Longevity Preparedness Index gives us a measurable reason to expand the definition.
Comprehensive now requires coordination across eight domains, including the Life Transitions that determine whether the plan executes as designed, the Care decisions that fall to families when the planner can no longer make them, and the cognitive trajectory the plan quietly assumes will hold.
The added years are a gift. The work to make them meaningful is broader than any one professional, any one document, or any one number on a financial statement.
That is what good planning looks like now.
At C3 Financial Partners, we work with families and business owners on the planning challenges that do not reduce to a single number. We help our clients gain clarity in their goals and objectives, confidence that they are making the right decisions, and coordination with their other advisors. The Longevity Preparedness Index is a useful new lens. The work it makes visible is work we have been doing for decades.
Securities offered through Valmark Securities, Inc., member FINRA, SIPC. Investment Advisory Services offered through Valmark Advisers, Inc. a Registered Investment Advisor, 130 Springside Drive, Suite 300, Akron, Ohio 44333-2431, 1.800.765.5201. C3 Financial Partners, LLC is a separate entity from Valmark Securities, Inc. and Valmark Advisers, Inc.
