“If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself. ” — Dick Van Dyke

Dick Van Dyke didn’t live a model life of disciplined health. He smoked heavily, drank a lot for decades, and nearly derailed himself more than once. Yet on December 13, 2025, he turned 100—something neither he nor anyone around him expected.

For financial advisors, his milestone isn’t just heartwarming. It signals a demographic shift already reshaping retirement planning. The U. S. centenarian population is projected to quadruple by 2050, turning extreme longevity from an anomaly into a baseline expectation.

Dick Van Dyke isn’t an outlier; he’s a preview of the future.

Longevity Risk: The Planning Variable That Won’t Sit Still

For most of the last century, reaching 100 was largely a matter of chance. Those days are gone. Medicine, behavioral change, and demographic shifts have altered survival curves far beyond what traditional retirement models were designed for.

As a result:

• More clients will reach 90, 95, and 100 than any previous generation.

• Many will do so despite health challenges.

• And just like Van Dyke, most won’t see it coming.

Van Dyke’s own life illustrates the point. The first half of his life was predicted to have a shortened longevity. Then he quit smoking, quit drinking, stayed active, and remained socially engaged. These behaviors didn’t guarantee he’d live to 100, after all, the longest-lived person smoked daily past age 100, but they increased his chances—something planners increasingly see in clients.

Longevity has become the dominant driver of retirement risk—and the least predictable.

Where Traditional Retirement Plans Start to Crack

Traditional retirement frameworks were not engineered for the “longevity era,” a world where dying at 78 is no longer the norm. Individuals, advisors, and society at large are not organized for a world where living to 95 is the base-case scenario.

Longer lifespans threaten to destabilize every component of a traditional retirement plan:

• Withdrawal rules strain over extended horizons.

• Sequence-of-return risk compounds across 35–40 years.

• Long-term care costs multiply as clients survive longer.

• Portfolio durability becomes a question of whether the plan outlives the client.

Dick Van Dyke’s 100th birthday is precisely the sort of event most clients do not anticipate—and most plans are not designed to support.

Why Advisors Need a Longevity-Informed Framework

Advisors don’t need to practice medicine to plan for health. They need a modernized framework that treats longevity as the central variable:

• Treat age 95–100 as standard planning horizons.

• Integrate health trajectories into annual planning conversations.

• Segment retirement into go.