Millions of Americans are spending fortunes to live longer, healthier lives. In this column I’m going to demonstrate that using the Couch Potato investing approach will work better. Indeed, I’ll show that the Couch Potato investing approach is likely to produce gains on par with those produced by our entire health care system in the last 75 years.
Yes, that’s a big claim. I’ll provide the necessary caveats. But the idea is simple. Couch Potato investing proposes, and demonstrates, that broad, very low-cost investing is likely to beat high-cost, managed investing 80 to 95 percent of the time. That approach works on our health, too.
Finding Your Healthy Life Expectancy
My informal laboratory for this exercise is the Healthy Life Expectancy Calculator at the Janet and Mark L. Goldenson Center for Actuarial Research at the University of Connecticut. It was chosen from the many life expectancy calculators for two reasons.
First, it distinguishes between years of healthy life and years of unhealthy life. I have yet to meet anyone who aspires to a long, unhealthy life. Most of us would prefer a long, healthy life with as little ill-health as possible. You can see how both change with the Goldenson Calculator.
Second, this calculator has only 15 questions/variables. Others have fewer, or many more. Here’s a list:
- Gender
- Height
- Weight
- Education level
- Income level
- Exercise amount
- Current health assessment
- Diabetes (Y/N)
- Smoking (Y/N)
- Driving History (Accidents)
- Alcohol consumption
Fill those in and press “Calculate.” The calculator provides a list of your predicted healthy future years, predicted unhealthy years, total years and life expectancy age. (It’s good to recall, here, that life expectancy is not a “you will die by age X.” It is the age at which half of a group of people like you will have died.) So you’ve got a 50 percent chance of living fewer, or more, years. But the group will have gained or lost years of life.
Impact On A Typical Mid-Fifties American
To have a starting spot many readers could identify with, I chose age 55 and the national average height and weight for Americans in that age range. I also assumed they had college educations, earned more than $100,000 a year, considered themselves in good health, didn’t have diabetes, had a diet that was only “fair,” didn’t smoke and didn’t have car accidents. Those are all rather positive assumptions.
Then I varied three simple things:
- Amount of exercise, from rarely to 3-4 days a week, skipping 5 days a week.
- Amount of sleep each night, from 5-8 hours a night to at least 8 hours a night.
- Amount of alcohol consumed, from 8-plus drinks a week to 2-3 drinks a week, skipping the option of rarely or never drinking.
An average 55-year-old man in America is 5 foot 9 inches tall and weighs 202 pounds. I compared figures for a man who sleeps only 5-8 hours a night, rarely exercises and has 8-plus drinks a week with a man who sleeps 8 hours, exercises 3-4 times weekly, and has 2-3 drinks a week. You can see the difference in the table below. An average 55-year-old-woman is 5 foot 4 inches tall and weighs 174 pounds. They are not svelte, which is the way we are.
Easy, Low-Cost Longevity |
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| This table shows the differences in healthy life years and unhealthy life years for 55-year-olds of average height and weight if they get better sleep, add some exercise to their schedule and reduce their consumption of alcohol. The differences will change for individuals of different ages, weights, incomes, educations and other factors. | |||
| Metric | Moderate Self Care | No Self Care | Difference |
| Men | |||
| Healthy LE | 35.4 years | 26.0 | +9.4 years |
| Unhealthy LE | 2.9 years | 3.7 | – 0.8 years |
| Total LE | 38.3 years | 29.7 | +8.6 years |
| Age at LE | 93.3 years | 84.7 | +8.6 years |
| Women | |||
| Healthy LE | 35.5 | 25.2 | +10.3 |
| Unhealthy LE | 4.3 | 5.5 | – 1.2 |
| Total LE | 39.7 | 30.6 | + 9.1 |
| Age at LE | 94.7 | 85.6 | + 9.1 |
| Source: https://apps.goldensoncenter.uconn.edu/HLEC/ | |||
Caveats?
These figures were not delivered on clay tablets. They are taken from a broad population sample and statistically sliced and diced. Trust the broad direction. Put a little salt on figures to the right of the decimal point. But modest, expense-free changes lead to a small reduction in how long you will be unhealthy and a huge change – nearly 10 years! – in additional healthy years of life.
These gains are not unique. Similar gains can be found using other life expectancy calculators. I used this one because it distinguishes between healthy years and unhealthy years. Further evidence comes from a widely noted study at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It noted that adopting five low-risk lifestyle factors can extend life expectancy by as much as 12 years for men and 14 years for women.
It would be difficult to overstate how much this means. Life expectancy in the U.S. was 68.14 years in 1950. This year, 2026, it is 79.54 years, a gain of 11.4 years over 76 years. It incorporates every advance in medical treatments, pharmacology, research in immunology, biochemistry and advances in public health. This gain had the advantage of measuring from birth. The lifestyle changes measure from age 55. They don’t have the advantage of more life-years gained from lower infant mortality, lower accidents and other factors in young people that have a powerful impact on life expectancy.
So our decisions are wildly powerful.
What This Means
We can have more impact on our health than the entire medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex.
Our health is in our hands first. We aren’t powerless. We – that’s you and me – have agency. We don’t need elaborate plans. Or huge expenses. We need to pay attention. We need to take care of ourselves.
The payoff is huge.
Related columns:
Scott Burns, “Retirement 2.0: Another Life,” 10/10/2025: https://scottburns.com/retirement-2-0-another-life/
Scott Burns, “Longevity of The Nerds (Continued),” 6/4/2022: https://scottburns.com/nerds-are-living-longer-witness-the-mit-class-of-1962/
Scott Burns, “You’ve Got to Have Heart!,” 9/12/2026: https://scottburns.com/youve-got-to-have-heart/
Sources and References:
The Goldenson Center Healthy Life Expectancy Calculator: https://apps.goldensoncenter.uconn.edu/HLEC/
Yanping Li, MD, PhD and others, “Impact of Healthy Lifestyle Factors on Life Expectancies in the US Population,” Circulation, April 2, 2018: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.117.032047?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=a66483f1f0-MR&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-a66483f1f0-149584961
This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.
Photo: Yes, you’ve seen this photo before! It was taken 6/24/24, a year after my first ablation for AFIB. Resting along the Camino in El Ganso, photo taken by my brother Don.
(c) Scott Burns, 2026