All evidence indicates that the subset of the American population who seek out financial advisors tend to enjoy longer lives. The human qualities of personal initiative, hard work, education and thrift aren’t distributed evenly, but individuals possessing those traits are destined to enjoy longer, better retirements.

So observed Nick Murray at Financial Advisor’s annual Inside Retirement conference in Atlanta on May 1.

Education is believed to play a major role in longevity. No, your clients aren’t living longer because they read Hemingway and listen to Vivaldi. There’s a correlation between someone with these interests and someone who lives a longer life, but correlation is different from causality.

One can argue all day about what’s fair and what isn’t, but when it comes to retirement, “inequality is baked into the cake,” Murray noted.

For financial advisors, the biggest challenge facing today’s clients is increasing the odds that long lives are high-quality lives.  “Most of you are going to sail through your 80s into your 90s, and some will live into your 100s,” Dr. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology and public policy at Stanford University and director of its Center on Longevity, told attendees at Financial Advisor’s fifth annual Invest in Women conference in Atlanta, also on May 1.

When set against the backdrop of human history, long lives have come about incredibly fast. In just 150 years, life expectancy has doubled. “It’s an amazing cultural achievement. Only humans could complain about this,” she said.

For the first time, families are seeing four, even five generations, alive at the same time. This changes obligations and alters the compact among generations. With so much going on in the middle of life, especially for working women, grandparents are playing a more important role in child-rearing.

Society is still trying to catch up with changing longevity. Stairs, Carstensen observed, are built for 25-year-olds.

Many of the myths about aging are based on historical evidence, not modern reality. Thirty years ago, older workers were less educated. That gap has disappeared, she argued. Older people are smarter today.

Health and longevity are not evenly distributed, and the correlation between longevity and education is nearly perfect. “Functional health deteriorates faster among people who dropped out of high school,” she said. But among people over 85 years old, more than half say they are healthy enough to work.

Rising longevity is not universal. The sad reality is that childhood obesity and the opioid epidemic are combining to curtail longevity for major segments of the middle-age population. Moreover, if disparities in longevity are increasing almost as fast as life expectancy itself, one thing remains constant. “The death rate is still 100%,” she said.

Cognitive decline is slight among those who don’t experience dementia, Carstensen maintained. It is the ability to process new information and novel concepts that erodes. That’s partly because, like an old computer, an older person has a store of knowledge that’s much greater.

On the dementia front, there is good news. Dementia has been declining significantly and is down 24% since 1970. But this figure needs to be understood in context, Carstensen explained. There are more people with Alzheimer’s because there are so many individuals in the target age population today, but the incidence is declining.

Financially, living longer is a game-changer. Survey after survey shows the vast majority of older workers haven’t saved enough to maintain their standard of living in retirement.

In fact, many have saved enough for a 1960s retirement but not the “long retirement” likely to emerge in the 21st century, said Steve Vernon, a retired Watson Wyatt actuary and current fellow at the Stanford Center on Longevity, speaking to attendees at Financial Advisor’s Inside Retirement conference on May 2. Retirees face a binary choice—work part time or reduce their standard of living—unless they can live a very spartan lifestyle.

Many middle-class Americans, folks with less than $2 million, are opting for some compromise between the two choices. At present, the labor market is characterized by an increasingly finite supply of workers, so more employers are willing to negotiate flexible arrangements and accommodate older employees. Home Depot, for example, allows certain older workers to head south for the winter and work part time in Florida stores during the peak snowbird season.

That said, it’s not always easy for retirees to return to work in reaction to a sudden crisis, like a stock market crash. And unfortunately, market downturns often coincide with economic slowdowns or recessions.

One of the easiest ways for retirees to slash living expenses is by relocating. A lot of ink has been spilled about the dramatic reductions in Americans’ ability to deduct state and local taxes since 2018, and the migration to low-tax states like Florida has accelerated.

Often, however, clients don’t have to move very far to adjust their lifestyles. Lauren Locker, who runs Locker Financial in Little Falls, N.J., tells retiring clients to consider moving “if they want a more financially comfortable retirement.” Nearby states like Pennsylvania and Delaware have much cheaper housing and insurance costs and significantly lower tax rates, and clients can remain within a few hours of family and friends in northern New Jersey via car or train. “North and South Carolina are [also] places where clients of mine have fled and thrived,” she says.

Decisions made during times of uncertainty with a growing number of variables are adding new dimensions of complexity. “Don’t wing it—be prepared to change your plans,” Vernon told advisors.

Yet most clients have their own life stories that define their attitudes, like “My mother died at 54 and I want to enjoy life” or “My aunt lived to 97, ran out of money and had to move in with her daughter.” Baseball great Mickey Mantle, whose father and grandfather never saw 50 years of age, was famously quoted as saying, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”

Science indicates there is a 25% to 50% correlation between genes and longevity, so it’s not linear. Many argue the correlation between life expectancy and education is a more accurate predictor.

Vernon argued that most people need to lengthen their planning horizons and frame out the rest of their lives. One way to achieve that is to think about how much their life has changed in the last 20 or 30 years.

Among the most important decisions are how and when to retire—a decision self-employed clients have a great deal more control over. How desirable and realistic is working part time in retirement? For affluent clients, working in a charity or nonprofit could be more rewarding, even if the income is minimal.

Vernon disparage s the idea of a magic formula. If one wants to use the 4% rule as a guideline, an advisor should build in some flexibility to adjust it up or down as circumstances change. The ideal situation is to create a retirement income stream that exceeds one’s living expenses but, with the financial markets offering anemic bond yields and interest rates, that’s a challenge for many people.

The age at which a person takes Social Security is another critical decision, even for clients with significant assets. Pensions are providing a smaller share of today’s retirement paycheck, and annuities, managed payout funds and other vehicles are trying to fill the gap. BlackRock and Microsoft formed a partnership to address the problem late last year, but both companies have been mum about what their plans are. Morningstar’s retirement research director, David Blanchett, says the best annuity is waiting until one reaches 69 or 70 years old to start taking Social Security.

Clients with larger pools of investable assets, those with $2.5 million to $5 million “have a shot at retirement where you don’t have to reduce your standard of living—if you make smart choices,” Vernon says. But most people have “unfinished business” reconnecting with old friends and relatives, ticking off items from bucket lists and going on travels. To the extent these goals can be factored into plans, they should be.

As one moves up the wealth scale north of $5 million in assets, Vernon says it becomes easier to deal with retirement challenges via investing and asset allocation decisions. “At that asset level, investing decisions become the most important decisions,” he maintains.

For all the talk among financial experts about a retirement crisis, there is little evidence to back it up. “Older people actually are doing better emotionally,” Carstensen said.

Anxiety, worry and especially stress all actually decline with age. That’s not because positive emotional experiences increase but because negative ones decline significantly.

At Morningstar’s annual conference in mid-May, Blanchett cited surveys showing that 95% of retirees describe themselves as happy. That’s good news, because an estimated 40 million Americans are somewhere between their 50th birthday and their retirement day.

If Blanchett is right, the next 20 years may turn out to be happier times than the last two decades.