Longevity is the biggest variable in most Americans' careers and retirements. As people live longer, retirements and careers are no longer playing out along the linear stages of life that they did in the second half of the 20th Century. The upshot is advisors are being forced to address clients' increasingly complex, extended lifecycles.

But one eternal reality remains constant. "Human nature is a failed investor." These issues were the subject of an illuminating talk by Nick Murray at Financial Advisor's 10th annual Inside Retirement conference in Atlanta on Wednesday, May 1, which happened to be the day Murray began working in the financial services industry 52 years ago.

In the late 1960s, the nascent advisory business was about managing money. Today, it's about leading and managing people, Murray said. Today, there are 40 million people who are over 50 years old still working towards their retirement day. Most are getting ready to make every mistake in the book.

Americans are programmed by the quixotic nature of society to run out of money in retirement and somewhere between 90 percent and 95 percent of them probably will, Murray said. For them, talk about a financial legacy is irrelevant.

"There won't be any legacy," Murray said, citing two of the most influential books of the last decade, Charles Murray's Coming Apart and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both books address in stark, sad detail the decline of America's white working class over the last 50 years.

Most people are in denial, he continued. There are some things financial advisors can do about this and much that is beyond even the most yeoman-like efforts of a relatively small profession.

American society is sensing that the top quintile is "breaking out of the pack" financially and most of the rest are falling behind. "I'm not here to defend or decry inequality," he told attendees. But given that financial initiative, hard work and thrift are unevenly distributed among humans, inequality is "baked into the cake.'

There is a tremendous correlation between longevity and education. "Your clients aren't living longer because they read Hemingway and listen to Vivaldi," Murray said.

But there also is a near-perfect inverse correlation between smoking and education. "Education in this country isn't delivered on an egalitarian basis," he explained.

Financial advisors and their clients eat healthier, get regular check-ups and exercise more frequently than most Americans. They even understand the link between periodontal wellness and heart disease.

Then there is the science of retirement. As late as the 1990s, there was no science-based institution designed to increase longevity. Today, these institutes and think tanks are proliferating.

Two weeks ago, scientists in Israel reported they could print 3-D hearts with a patient's own cells. It's significant because hearts manufactured from the patient's own cells should not be rejected.

"All of the wild blue yonder stuff you are hearing about longevity is probably closer to the truth than you think," Murray said.

But since human nature is "a failed investor," it's the responsibility of advisors to lead clients out of their dangerous misconceptions. The biggest single mistake people make when they enter retirement, in Murray's view, is moving most of their assets to bonds.

Sadly, this fate awaits a major chunk of the few Americans who manage to save enough for retirement. "You freeze your principal not seeing that you are freezing your income," he observed. "A fixed-income strategy in retirement is suicide—suicide on the installment plan."

The longer people live, the further their income is likely to fall behind the cost of living. Trendline inflation over the last 30 years as measured by the Consumer Price Index is 2.9 percent. So $1 worth of goods in 1989 now costs $2.40.

"The primary goal of retirement investing isn't growth or income," he noted. It's maintaining purchasing power to sustain a dignified lifestyle.

This brought him to the subject of target-date funds, which he described as a Dr. Kevorkian-style solution to retirement investing. At the end of 2018, there were $2.5 trillion in retirement assets sitting in target-date funds.

That number is expected to increase to $4 trillion by the end of 2020. Murray said these bond-heavy funds would soon approach 50 percent of the nation's retirement assets."If you can't make a business out of that, I don't know what you can make a business out of."

What is the magic elixir or serum to rescue millions of older Americans from a slow but inexorable decline in their living standards guaranteed by target-date funds? The rapidly rising dividends of U.S. and other global multi-national corporations.

Since 1960, the cash dividends of companies in the S&P 500 have compounded at a rate of 5.9 percent, or twice the rate of inflation. Viewed through another lens, the cost of living has increased 9 times since 1960, while cash dividends from the S&P 500 have increased 27 times.

The index itself is up 50 times. "I wouldn't tell them that [last fact] because for one shining moment I'd try to get them to stop focusing on principal and focus on income."

Clients who do might be among the few Americans who can provide a legacy. The real definition of wealth, he concluded, is an income "you can't outlive and can leave behind."