The key to a good financial plan is to develop a strategy that helps you accumulate assets during your working years to create enough income to maintain a lifestyle in retirement that you don’t outlive. To do that planning, we need to know something that’s impossible to predict. That’s ‘how long will I live’? We can’t give a date, but we are getting closer to an accurate prediction.

Longevity research is getting good enough to identify how we all age at varying rates. There are ‘super-agers’ who are just born with great genes. But there is more and more research showing that our habits and routines matter a lot. That means everything from how we move our bodies to what we eat and who we hang out with can determine whether we will age well. 

One very intriguing test is the ‘GrimAge test. This test predicts your biological age. It gauges whether your DNA age is younger or older than your numerical or chronological age. The test can estimate how quickly, or slowly, you’re aging.

They go through with DNA methylation, which observes modifications in our DNA. Compounds in our DNA called methyl groups stick to DNA molecules. – that can turn genes on or off. They’ve learned there’s a higher the concentration of methylated DNA in certain locations, the more accelerated a person’s age.

Just learning what might be aging you is important- but biologists are now coming up with interventions that could slow down biological aging as well. They have found ‘methylation’, or methyl groups attaching to our DNA speeds up aging. One thing that has a strong effect on methylation is smoking. The ill effects of smoking are nothing new. But interventions to the effects of smoke can possibly move the needle to living longer. 

They don’t have all of the answers yet… but they’re learning quickly.