24 • MARTIN H. RUBY
Finding the Balance My IRA may end up being used like this:
But here’s what I realized: my IRA — and your IRA, too — is a zero-sum game. That means the more money I use as income, the less money I have as inheritance for my kids. And the more inheritance I want to leave my kids, the less of my IRA I can spend as income. As an actuary, I’m trained on life expectancy and risk. When I counsel people on saving, I emphasize an important reality: The risk to your loved ones is dying too soon, but the risk to your sav- ings is living too long. Medical advances are helping people live longer and fuller lives — many of us will live well into our nineties or even beyond. Life expectancy is nearly ten years longer today than it was when I started saving in the 1970s. That means we’re going to use
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