Longevity Risk
✓ Last verified 14 Sep 2026
The short version
Longevity risk is the risk of outliving your retirement savings - rising life expectancy means planning for a shorter retirement than you'll actually have is a real, common miscalculation, not a conservative safety margin.
Planning a corpus to last 20 years when you actually live 30 years post-retirement isn't cautious planning - it's a real shortfall that surfaces exactly when you're least able to earn your way out of it. Rising life expectancy and improving healthcare mean longevity risk is generally underestimated, not overestimated - see our article on how much you actually need to retire for planning around a realistically longer retirement horizon rather than a conservative-sounding shorter one.
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