The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker
Every poker player counts his stack, but a good one counts something else as well: how the stack is made up. A pile of chips you can bet freely is worth more than the same-sized pile half committed to side obligations. Health works exactly that way, and it is the stack no statement ever shows. When we count it at all, we usually make the beginner’s mistake — we count the total and never ask how much of it is actually in play.
Researchers who study aging draw a distinction every retiree should learn, because there are two numbers, not one. The first is life expectancy: how long you are likely to live. The second is healthy life expectancy: how many of those years you are likely to live in good health — able to travel, to work in the yard, to get down on the floor with a grandchild and get back up again. Between the two numbers lies a gap: years in which illness or disability limits what a person can do. For many people that gap runs to years, not months, and it may be the least planned-for number in all of retirement.
I learned to see the gap in my law practice long before I had a name for it. Clients would arrive with their estates in order and their savings carefully husbanded for the trip to Europe, the cabin by the lake, the years of doing everything they had postponed. Then the healthy years ran out before the savings did, and the money sat there, perfectly preserved, funding a life that had quietly narrowed to doctors’ appointments and paid help. They had counted their years with great care. They had never counted their healthy years, and the two counts told very different stories.
The gap decides practical questions that money alone cannot answer. It decides where you can live — whether the stairs, the driving distance, and the route to a hospital still work when you are the one who needs them daily instead of rarely. And it decides how much care will cost, because the years inside the gap are the years when help gets hired: first the yard, then the house, then the person. A plan built on life expectancy alone quietly assumes twenty-five years of independent living. A plan built on healthy life expectancy funds independence generously and dependence honestly — and those are two very different budgets. The same logic reaches your paperwork: powers of attorney, a health care directive, and arrangements for who decides when you cannot are not morbid documents. They are simply the plans a thoughtful player makes for the stretch of the game he may not be able to play unaided.
Counting honestly is the first move. Take a real inventory: your conditions, your medications, your strength, your balance, your energy, your weight, your sleep, your hearing, your vision. Then ask your physician the question few patients ask: what are the most important steps for my health in the next ten years? Nobody enjoys this count. It has roughly the charm of counting a short stack at the table. But a player who refuses to count a short stack does not thereby have a bigger one. He just has surprises coming.
The count also tells you how to sequence the years you have. If healthy years are the scarcer chip, they should be spent like one: the long trips taken while you can take them, the physically demanding pleasures front-loaded rather than deferred, the house adapted or exchanged while the decision is still yours to make calmly. Your healthy years are the high-denomination chips of the late game, and they are the first ones you will lose. A plan that saves all the living for later mistakes which stack runs out first.
Here is the takeaway. Sit down this week and write both numbers: your honest best estimate of your life expectancy, and beneath it, your healthy life expectancy. Then ask three questions of your plan. Does my spending front-load the things that require health? Does my housing still work inside the gap? Have I set aside anything for the care the gap may require? The two numbers will never match, and that is not bad news — it is the count. Build your plan for the smaller number, and be grateful for every year the larger one gives you beyond it.
