Jay Jackson
Chairman & CEO
I was on The Greg Kelly Show last month talking about longevity data and financial planning, and Greg asked me a question I get asked a lot: “How do we get rich?”
Here’s my answer: Stop thinking about wealth as money. Start thinking about it as time.
If you’re on your deathbed looking back, what are you going to wish you had more of? It’s not going to be another million in the bank. It’s going to be time. Time with people you love. Time to do things that matter. Time you can never get back.
The problem is, we’re terrible at valuing time because we refuse to think honestly about how much of it we have left.
Nobody Thinks They’ll Live That Long
Not “that’s helpful information” or “let me adjust my plans accordingly.” The gut reaction is denial.
We hear from longevity researchers that we’re all going to live forever. Anti-aging startups raise billions. Silicon Valley believes death is a problem to be solved. Meanwhile, Dick Van Dyke just became the first person over six feet tall to live to 100—at least that we’ve measured. I’m 6’6. There’s nobody we can find who’s lived past 95 at my height.
The gap between the hype and the reality creates a dangerous kind of magical thinking. People defer Social Security because they assume they’ll live into their 90s. They make major financial decisions—when to retire, how to allocate assets, whether to downsize—based on vibes rather than data.
Why would you make the biggest financial decisions of your life without knowing the single most important variable: how long you’re actually going to be making withdrawals?
The Last Years Are Brutal
He passed away in August. Those last two years were incredibly expensive and painful. But they were only two years.
Now imagine that’s four years. Or six. You’re going to watch half your net worth disappear in the final stretch of life—not because you planned poorly, but because you didn’t plan for the right timeline.
And here’s the cruel irony: by the time most people come to us for lifespan data, they’re 80 years old. They don’t feel good. Their medicine cabinet is overwhelming. We tell them they likely have seven more years, and the response isn’t relief—it’s dread. Because seven more years of this sounds exhausting.
That’s what happens when you don’t think about healthspan alongside lifespan. That’s what happens when you optimize for quantity without considering quality.
Your Most Important Asset Isn’t What You Think
Nobody says “my medical files.”
But here’s a fact that should terrify you: the number one cause of death in emergency rooms is misdiagnosis. Not because physicians are incompetent, but because they don’t have complete information. They’re making life-or-death decisions based on whatever fragments of your medical history they can access in the moment.
Your medical files are your most important asset. They determine whether you get the right diagnosis. They inform every major healthcare decision. They’re the foundation of any serious longevity plan. And most people have no idea where theirs are, much less have them organized and accessible.
This is the gift of time in its most literal form.
What Being “Rich” Actually Means
Not by inventing time travel. By making better decisions now about how to preserve healthspan and allocate your remaining years.
That means knowing your actual lifespan probability—not guessing, not assuming, not deferring to societal averages that don’t account for your specific medical history, family background, and risk factors.
That means treating your health as the primary investment, not the thing you optimize after you’ve handled your “real” financial planning.
That means understanding that the decisions you make at 65—about Social Security, about retirement accounts, about when to sell the house or downsize—should be informed by data, not hope.
The irony is that people spend months researching which index fund to choose or whether to refinance their mortgage, then make a decision about when to claim Social Security—one of the biggest financial choices of their life—based on nothing more than a hunch and what their neighbor did.
The Bottom Line
The wealthiest thing you can do is treat it that way.
Know how much you likely have. Plan accordingly. Invest in the things—muscle mass, community, mental acuity, organized medical information—that actually extend healthspan, not just lifespan.
Because nobody on their deathbed wishes they’d spent more time managing their portfolio. They wish they’d spent more time living well with the time they had.
That’s what being rich actually means.
