What month would you be in if life were a year?

One of the most difficult aspects of my work is approaching the subject of death. We covered some practical elements of this in our last edition of Spotlight (Spring 2025). It’s a very difficult topic, one of the last taboos. Most of us would prefer to avoid the discussion, in fact I have even met a couple of people who told me not to talk about it because it would hasten their death, which is one of the more strange responses I have had.

Most of us grow up with the expectation that life will be long, we will reach old age and have a lengthy, good retirement. We all come to experience loss; some of us at a very early age. We are often shocked by the news of someone young, or relatively young who has died. It feels as though their lives have been cut short.

The purpose of raising the subject is not to be the voice of doom, but to enable you to really do two things. Firstly, prepare for your death, which means getting your legal documents in place and ensuring that your beneficiaries are properly taken care of. Secondly, it is a reminder that life is brief, none of us know when it is our time, so we ought to be attempting to live a full life, one that doesn’t have too much deferred into the future, but feels very fulfilling here and now in the present.

You may have seen all sorts of data showing the average life expectancy of a man or woman in the UK. There is even a “death clock” which takes your age now and calculates the expected day of your death based on your health, outlook and country of residence. This of course is an informed guess based on international averages. The reality is that if you have a financial planner, you have money.  And if you have money, you probably have the ability to access better healthcare and make better dietary/fitness choices. You probably (not necessarily) have a lower level of stress. As a result, you are likely to outlive the average.

However, most of us rarely think about this and go about our lives with the expectation of a fairly long and healthy future ahead of us still. We tend to think life will stretch out ahead of us, there will be ample time. However, if life was a calendar year, I wonder what month you would be in?

If we were to consider each month representing eight years of our lifetime, then life expectancy would be 96. Turning 56 means it’s July with the expectation of a few summer months. At 72 you have reached October. I wonder if thinking about life this way might encourage us to take each day a little more thankfully – and thoughtfully. The average person would have each month represent seven years, so at 56 it’s August already.

It’s a bit alarming and perhaps morbid, but surely an important reminder that life is very brief indeed. We don’t know what the future holds, but ask yourself, do you really want to be spending a significant proportion of it worrying about money or attempting to manage it? Ultimately, that is the point of delegating your financial planning to us, so that you can go and do the important things that you value most.

Sadly, I regularly meet people with diagnosed conditions that shorten their lives; and whilst we all know that money cannot buy time, actually you can create more time to do the things that you value because of the backdrop of a great financial plan based on what’s important to you. It is never about you spending valuable time managing your own investments.

References:

Death Clock: https://www.death-clock.org/

ONS mortality tables: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths