WSJ Your Money Briefing - Can Money Buy a Longer Life? Yes – to a Point

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

People with high salaries and net worth tend to live longer lives, research shows. And while you can’t add more months to your shopping cart yet, Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Pinsker joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss ways to spend money to improve your chances of living longer Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Offer ends January 31st, 2025. Visit td.com slash dioffer to learn more. Here's your money briefing for Thursday, January 9th. I'm JR Whalen for the Wall Street Journal. Saving money can boost the size of your nest egg and make you feel better about the future. But what about living a longer life? The things that help people live longer are pretty well established.

Eat better, sleep more, exercise more, spend time with friends. So you can make improvements on those fronts without ever spending a dime, but you can also spend in a smart way to level up on each of those. Reporter Joe Pinsker covers the pursuit of happiness for the WSJ's personal finance team. He'll join us after the break. As the saying goes, the rich get richer, but many of them live longer lives. Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Pinsker looked into the research behind that, and he joins me. Joe, according to research you cited

that was published in the journal, JAMA Internal Medicine, once Americans make it to their late 50s, the wealthiest 10% live to a median age of around 86 years. That's roughly 14 years longer than the least wealthy 10%. Why do wealthy people tend to live longer? A simple way to say it is that money buys a lot of stuff that helps you live longer. Health care is a big one, of course, buying healthy food, maybe a gym membership.

But it's also important to recognize how not everything about the relationship between money and longevity has to do with individual level spending decisions. Neighborhoods with richer residents tend to have less violence and less pollution plus better parks and schools. So it's partially about what money buys and it's partially about your communities and surroundings that a certain amount of money unlocks. What is it only money that can extend someone's longevity?

It's really about how to use money in a strategic way. The things that help people live longer are pretty well established and they're not entirely shocking. Eat better, sleep more, exercise more, spend time with friends. So you can make improvements on those fronts without ever spending a dime, but you can also spend in a smart way to level up on each of those. Now what's the correlation between money and longevity as people age? It is the case that a higher income and a higher net worth is correlated with living

longer but when you look at something like income you can see that there are kind of diminishing returns here. On average somebody with a household income of $14,000 would live about 10 fewer months than someone making $20,000. And that same 10-month gap exists at a higher level of income between incomes of roughly $160,000 and $225,000 and $225,000 and 1.95 million dollars. So that was a lot of numbers, but basically the 10 month gap in lifespan, it starts to require sort of more and more money, the more money you make. Those numbers come from a 2016 study that used 2012 inflation adjusted dollars, but that can give you a sense of the scale of the diminishing returns here. Now for those of us who aren't ultra wealthy or have a high net worth,

what could we spend on to add extra years to our lives? The more obvious ways to think about this are to buy things that will help you live a healthier life like a gym membership or maybe blackout curtains that help you sleep better. But there were some really great sort of advanced pieces of advice that I got when I was interviewing experts on aging for my story. And one piece of advice that I really loved was to try to target your spending to things that kind of tick multiple boxes in terms of health benefits. And one example here that I really adored was a gerontologist at Cornell University said that she often recommends that people in older age take up the activity of ballroom dancing because it comes with

benefits on multiple tiers. You have the physical benefits of moving around and dancing, you have the cognitive benefits of memorizing the steps, and you have the social benefits of doing this alongside a group of people. So it doesn't have to be ballroom dancing, but that was one that jumped out at me. I've done ballroom dancing. Does that mean Joe, that me and my two left feet are in for a long life? I can personally guarantee it.

Okay, that's the best news I've heard all day. Now, Joe, you cover the pursuit of happiness for the WSJ's personal finance team. Is the lesson here that money isn't everything? That's a fair takeaway, you know, from a lot of the stories that I write. The key here in this case is that it's not as much about the money itself, but about how you use it. It's thinking about it as a tool to turn the dial on the things that we know to help us

live longer. Does it matter whether I start taking on these activities and passion projects earlier or later in life? Yes, both are good. One idea that came up in my reporting for this article was that it's really valuable to invest your money and also your time in new hobbies and activities sort of throughout your life. And doing this at a young age is a good way to discover the

things that might turn into lifelong passions that you spend all day doing in old age. But it's also really good to sprinkle in novel activities later on in life because those can sort of stimulate you intellectually and socially in a way that just helps you age better. There are also a bunch of apps and gadgets on the market that can track people age better. There are also a bunch of apps and gadgets on the market that can track people's health. What do experts you spoke with say about their benefits? I went into the reporting for this article wondering how much money you really sort of needed to spend

if your goal was to live a longer life. And a couple of experts I spoke with were really big fans of health tracking devices like the Apple Watch in the aura ring. These are not cheap gadgets, but they were saying that these are worth it. Having access to health data can give you regular prompts to live out healthier habits, like getting more steps or getting more sleep. And it's also useful for kind of keeping tabs on your overall health between what are for a lot of people are annual health checkups.

Oftentimes people put emphasis on chronological years when they focus on longevity. Will I live to 75, 85, 95? But how do experts say people could better think about living longer? The key here is to think about something that doesn't have as much to do with money as what we've been talking about. on that sort of blank canvas of years that stretches out ahead of you. That's WSJ reporter Joe Pinsker. And that's it for your money briefing. We'll be back tomorrow with WSJ's Matt Grossman to discuss why many unemployed office workers are having a hard time finding a job. This episode was produced by Ariana Asparut with supervising producer Melanie Roy and deputy editor Chris Zinsley. I'm JR Whalen for The Wall Street Journal.

Thanks for listening.