A New Map of Life (and Retirement): 100 Years

This week we have the pleasure of chatting with Martha Deevy of the Stanford Center on Longevity. The Center is focused on re-imagining how we plan for retirement and how we live in retirement. Martha has more than 25 years in senior executive positions at Intuit, Charles Schwab and Apple. Since 2009, Martha has been the Senior Research Scholar and Director of the Financial Security Program at the Stanford Center on Longevity.

Martha’s taking a break from the 2022 Century Summit to join us, and we have a lot to talk about. Let’s jump in!

Martha Deevy, your career exists at the fascinating intersection of financial services, technology, and longevity.

I feel like I've seen the world from two sides now. And from a practical standpoint, what I have been enlightened by since being at Stanford really is how much good academic research is out there that can be applied to solving some of these real-world problems.

I often say I could have saved a lot of market research money when I was running businesses, if I only would have knocked on a few academic doors. There is a whole cohort of researchers who are very much focused on front-line impact, and they understand that change happens outside of the red brick walls of a university and that the stakeholders who can really drive impact are private industry and policy makers. Trying to bridge those worlds is really what I do; it’s what I think I bring to the party.

Don’t miss The New Map of Life

As I've seen at a couple of conferences I've attended recently, everyone is looking for evidence that they can use to figure out how to make these changes that we're talking about.

Whether it's the financial services industry saying we recognize there is a population that is at risk, what can we do about it? or academic researchers who are saying we've just made this more complicated, and I think we have ways to simplify it. I don't know if that's a really cogent answer to the question, but because I've seen both sides I think there is great power in pulling together good evidence-based research with the people who can really implement change.

Tell us about the Stanford Center on Longevity.

The Stanford Center on Longevity is 14 years old and it was co-founded by a psychologist gerontologist Laura Carstensen and a neurologist, stem cell biologist Tom Rando.

The interesting story of how it was established came about because Stanford is a very interdisciplinary community, meaning, the economists are always talking to the psychologists. There was a casual conversation among a number of faculty about how the changing demographic trends that we saw 20 to 25 years ago indicating an aging, but more importantly, a longer-lived, population wasn't really causing any conversation about what has to change.

In the last 50 years, we've added 20 years to life expectancy, yet the underlying social and cultural infrastructure was built for lives that ended far earlier.

These faculty members asked themselves "why isn't somebody doing something about this?" That conversation ended up getting written up in a Stanford Alumni Magazine article, which caught the attention of a Stanford alumni who called Laura Carstensen’s office and said “well, what are you going to do about it?” His interest helped jumpstart the work of the Center.

Getting to work really meant identifying what are those social changes — what are those cultural changes that we need to be paying attention to in order to optimize what will be 100-year lives?

We love that. The 100-year life is here. What does that mean, Martha, and how should we be thinking about it?

We think optimizing 100-year lives is not just something that happens at the end of life. We're a longevity center. Talking about children is as important to us as talking about older people. We think it means looking across a number of domains and behaving differently than we are today, both as individuals and as a society.

The most influential domains that impact how well we live our 100-year lives start much sooner. They include early childhood education, healthy behaviors, and healthcare. It's work and the future of work, and it's financial security.

And notice that I am not saying retirement. I’m actually talking about financial security across the lifetime.

We also think it's about changing things in our built environment and, of course, climate. We think changes need to be made and can be made. And there's evidence that indicates changes made in each of these domains really does begin to optimize lifetime wellbeing. Ultimately, what we're talking about is how well people are living through the course of 100-year lives. So it's not just making it to 100, but it's doing it healthfully, feeling cognitively fit and physically fit and financially secure.

One of the tenets of this good long life is the need to build financial security from early on. As Americans, how are we doing?

Not well. Most people aren't feeling financially secure, particularly as they near what they perceive to be retirement age.

This includes questions of student debt (interestingly, which many older adults carry), as well as the inability to save money to purchase a house. We know that a house is an asset and an important financial security measure over the course of a lifetime. We're seeing younger generations having a harder and harder time purchasing a house and they're the ones who are really going to have to face financing these longer lives.

So, I think the conversation really needs to begin to change from one focuses only on what do we have to do to retire? to a discussion about how do we enable, and how do we make wise financial decisions across the whole life cycle?

I’d like to change the conversation around from financial security to financial resiliency — I think it's important to be talking to people entering into the workforce: what decisions should you be making about credit, about student debt, what should you do if your employer offers a retirement plan, and what if they don’t.  

Educating people early on about the financial decisions they're going to have to make builds an awareness around the importance of making sound financial decisions, so that when that moment comes where they're considering retirement, they've been making sound financial decisions all along.

I think what really needs to change around how we think about financing long lives is that it starts early.

What are the implications of doing better, what does that look like, including for a range of communities within America?

Let me touch on the latter point first. We often talk about averages and some of the great inequities that we see between income disparities and racial and cultural disparities.

I'm keenly aware that when I talk about financial resiliency and the ability to make these decisions over the course of a lifetime, that for some people it's going to be easier.

An important thing we have to think about is how do we make it easy for everyone, not just those who have access to information, expertise, and advice. We are very conscious of the inequity question issue out there.

So we're living longer. What does the world look like if we do a better job of preparing for these longer, hopefully healthy, lives?

One of the important changes I think we're already beginning to see is that as we live longer lives, then the traditional three-staged life path doesn't look the same any longer.

It's not just education in the early part, work in the middle, and then retire — it's a much more fluid path where education is happening throughout the course of your life because you are needing and wanting to build and learn new skills along the way.

Everyone at some point will likely be a caregiver. So there are going to be periods, whether it's for caregiving or whether it's recharged sabbatical or re-skilling sabbatical, where stepping out of the workforce for a while will become the norm. We're going to have to look at creating better on road, off-ramps, and on-ramps back into the workforce.

If we do this well, financing those different paths won't be a shock. We talk about programs to save for retirement and that we should have programs that allow us to finance all of those changes; the periods of education and re-education, the periods of non-income earning, stepping out of the workforce. We shouldn't just have programs that save for one end game. So if we do it well, we can finance those shifts.

The Center has a wealth of resources to help us get smarter about this.

Yes. our website has all of our publications and access to other resources that are looking at things similarly to us. We very much focus on domestic issues, but a lot of what we do is happening worldwide as well. We also have an initiative that catalyzed a lot of this new thinking called The New Map of Life, where we are now actively trying to identify what are the scalable interventions around early childhood education, healthy behaviors, that can really impact and improve this lifetime wellbeing that we're talking about.

We just brought in our second cohort of post-doctoral fellows who are now working with private industry, policymakers and other people and organizations who are interested in intervention programs.

They're beginning to evaluate how scalable some of these programs are. So we're now moving to the front line and really trying to understand what is being tried, what is working and identifying other interventions that can still be tried. I would encourage anybody who's interested in what's happening on the frontline, or interested in participating in figuring out what's on the frontline, to first visit our website and to connect if it makes sense.

As I mentioned, we are focused on the domains we identified as the ones that offer real change opportunities — and those changes are not moonshots.

Practical is what we're hearing. Pragmatical, pragmatic and available.

We kicked off this initiative with a convening of experts in 2017. We had 70 people in the room and challenged everyone to talk about significant change that could happen within a 50-year window, “let’s not talk about it unless we can realistically make it happen in 50 years”.

We always include university students or young people in our conversations and many of them were saying, we can’t make radical disruptive change that would scale in the 50-year window.

All we had to do was point to our smartphones. Disruptive change can happen far more quickly than we sometimes think.

What feels very positive to you in terms of what we're doing — and what keeps you awake at night that we need to spend more energy on?

Because of the world I live in — working at a university — I'm surrounded by young people. I'm surrounded by smart people. What I'm really optimistic about is that younger generations will catalyze a lot of the changes that we're talking about. I think younger people are already thinking about, already accepting and knowing they're going to live longer lives. They have a lot of good models of people who are living long and well. So I'm very optimistic about young people and their generation.

And what keeps me up at night is asking what are we doing to help facilitate those changes for them?

Thank you Martha for sharing these important insights and resources! We appreciate your perspective.

Martha Deevy joined the Stanford Center on Longevity in January, 2009 and serves as Associate Director and Senior Research Scholar. While at the Center, she has led the financial security research program which has focused efforts on retirement readiness, working longer and the detection and prevention of fraud. Prior to joining Stanford, Martha had a long career with Silicon Valley firms.  She has held positions in business development, strategic planning, finance, product development and IT and held senior executive positions at Apple, Charles Schwab and Intuit.  She has served on the boards of directors of a number of publicly traded and non-profit organizations and is currently the vice-chair for the SPOON Foundation, which serves nutritionally underserved children. She received an M.B.A. in Finance and Management Information Systems from University of Minnesota and a B.A. in Economics from University of Illinois. LinkedIn and by email here.

This piece was featured in the December 15, 2022, edition of Retirement Security Matters. For more fresh thinking on retirement savings innovation, check out the newsletter here