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Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

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Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#81

Post by StevenOtto »

slg wrote: post #70

I remember reading somewhere on the internet about a person who had a decorative bowl in their house. This bowl was full of marbles. Once a week, they would take a marble out of the bowl and throw it away. Each marble was a week of their life. When they started this practice, they calculated their life expectancy and bought enough marbles for each week they were statistically expected to live. The idea is to give you…

Chris Crawford perhaps! http://kotaku.com/30-years-later-one-mans-still-trying-to-fi...

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#82

Post by jsprogrammer »

ghshephard wrote: post #27
peteretep wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're asking "Can I insure my newborn for the rest of their life for a predictable premium?" the answer is yes.

Indeed (though this one doesn't cover newborns, need to be at least 15 days old): https://www.sbli.com/products/life-insurance/whole-life-for-...

Yes, but what is the implied life expectancy? I'd guess pretty low.

Also note that policies like this require ongoing maintenance payments, otherwise you forfeit past payments and benefits.

The problem with claiming that the life insurance market is a predictor for death statistics is that firms tend to keep the most important data and calculations used to derive their pricing schemes secret. The firm is only concerned with keeping to projections as far out as they can model.

The consumer has no real input into the model (except as a selector of alternatives) and therefore cannot obtain much knowledge about actual death statistics (except perhaps a near meaningless lower-bound).

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#83

Post by alexandre_m »

cm2012 wrote: post #34

I'm 24, and I recently bought $2 million of life insurance for $80 a month that's good for the next 10 years. I figure that's a pretty good deal. If I die young, I want my wife to not have to worry about money.

That's a clever way for keeping your wife for the next 10 years.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#85

Post by ohleg »

The thing about this tool is it answers the following question: given your gender and your age (and no other data about you), based on CDC data of mortality in the US, how many more years do you have left to live?

In reality, you'd likely better be able to predict your remaining years if you have more details about yourself (you should, unless you're Benjamin Kyle). Are you a long-term heavy smoker, overweight like most Americans, or do you work in a dangerous job like construction? You're more likely to live less. On the other hand, do you have a safe job, stay physically fit, and avoid alcohol and drugs? You're more likely to live more.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#86

Post by kawera »

Jonovono wrote: post #79
Raphmedia wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Once birth date is set, you can click it to change it." ... I then clicked the age of death and couldn't change it :(

Oh, ya. You can only change the 'birth date'. I should update it so you can change the 'death date' too!

Yes please, specially for those with so few light squares remaining :(

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#87

Post by cosmorocket »

lucaspiller wrote: post #68
cosmorocket wrote: post #20

Last autumn I was involved in working on a similar web app [1] for WorldBank which consumed its data sources. I think it should be more accurate as they at WorldBank collect the data from multiple sources and process it in a scientifically precise manner. You can enter country you live in, which can make a dramatic difference. [1] http://population.io

Hearing I'm older than 46% of the worlds population is pretty interesting. I'm only 27.

If you have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag..., you will see that the total world age median is 29.7.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#88

Post by ghshephard »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #82
ghshephard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed (though this one doesn't cover newborns, need to be at least 15 days old): https://www.sbli.com/products/life-insurance/whole-life-for-...

Yes, but what is the implied life expectancy? I'd guess pretty low. Also note that policies like this require ongoing maintenance payments, otherwise you forfeit past payments and benefits. The problem with claiming that the life insurance market is a predictor for death statistics is that firms tend to keep the most important data and calculations used to derive their pricing schemes secret. The firm is only concern…

There is a One-time payment option.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#89

Post by roryokane »

fredkbloggs wrote: post #52

> And I should probably look into life insurance. Why? What exactly is it that you think "life insurance" does? If there were a product that would reduce the variance in remaining life length, that might be interesting, but that's not what "life insurance" is. All it does is pay someone else some amount of money when you die, after you pay them some (usually increasing) amount each year while you're alive (with count…

The EV of all insurance policy is negative when measured in absolute dollars. But the EV can be positive if the value of dollars to you doesn’t scale linearly.

For example, if you have to spend $10,000 on medical bills, that might be 1 unit of disutility. But if you have to spend $100,000 on medical bills, that might be 30 units of disutility, not 10, because you just don’t have that kind of money and you will go bankrupt and your quality of life will go way down. With this reasoning, health insurance might have a positive EV for utility, even though it has a premium that gives you a negative EV for money.

This reasoning is less likely to apply to life insurance, because people are less likely to care about what happens after they die. But for people whose beneficiaries would suffer a lot from losing their income – perhaps they would be evicted – life insurance can be worth it.

Re: Years You Have Left to Live, Probably

#90

Post by robzyb »

netcan wrote: post #17
robzyb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actuarial student here. Mortality improvements are important, but immaterial in this context ;) I think that this should be taken as more of a qualitative illustration of the uncertainty of life, as opposed to a quantitative measurement.

Can you elaborate? Are you saying the assumption that the curve will change significantly is questionable or that the effects of the assumed change in the curve change are immaterial? IE, if we accept an assumption that the curve will shift such that average life expectancy at birth is 110 50 years from today, how is this immaterial for a 30 year old today? My common sense understanding is that their chance of kickin…

> Are you saying the assumption that the curve will change significantly is questionable or that the effects of the assumed change in the curve change are immaterial?

Sorry, that's not quite what I am saying.

My point was that "given the purpose of this analysis, mortality factors are immaterial."

If the purpose of this analysis was to give some quantitative answers that were going to be used as the basis for decisions - then it's highly likely that you would want to build in mortality improvement.

However, in this case the analysis is just a simple illustration to convey a simple idea (actual lifespan vs life expectancy), and I would say that building in mortality improvement would muddy the waters and make it just that little bit harder for the audience to understand.

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