How Many Good Years Do You Actually Have Left?
Updated: Sep 5
Every retirement calculator asks the same question: how much money do you need? Every advisor, every spreadsheet, every "are you on track" quiz — money, money, money.
I think that's the second question. Here's the first one, the one almost nobody asks out loud: how much body do you have left?
Three Clocks, Not One
We tend to think about retirement with a single number in mind — the age we stop working. But there are actually three separate clocks running, and most of us have only ever looked at one of them.
There's your lifespan — cradle to grave, the whole thing. There's your retirement years — the day you stop working to the day you die. And then there's a third number nobody puts on a chart: your usable retirement years. That's the stretch from the day you retire to the day your body says no. Not the day you die — the day you stop being able to do the things retirement was supposed to be for.
Those three numbers are not the same. You could retire at 62 with 25 genuinely good years ahead of you — sharp, mobile, still able to get on and off a plane without a second thought. Or you could retire at 62 and get five. Same start date, wildly different outcome. The gap between those two futures is the whole reason I wrote a book about it.
That's exactly the gap I map out in The Usable Years — click here to see where your own three clocks might be pointing.
My Own Number
I didn't come to this question in the abstract. My mother's side of the family has dementia running through it. My father's side, heart attacks. Looking at that lineage honestly, I plan around 75 as my own timeline. Not a guess I keep in a drawer somewhere — the actual number I build my decisions around.
It's not only family history, either. Compare yourself at 30, at 40, at 50 — the aches show up on a schedule, recovery takes longer every decade, and you don't need a doctor to tell you that. You can feel your own decline curve if you're honest enough to look at it. That's not pessimism. That's just data.
Nothing Is Guaranteed, Which Is the Point
My mom's health wasn't good later in life, and to her credit, she started trying to turn it around — real effort, real workouts. Then she was in a car accident, and she was gone. The thing that ended her usable years wasn't the thing she'd spent years worried about.
I think about that constantly. Not to scare anyone — most of us get more runway than that. But because it's proof that "someday" isn't a plan. You can do everything right and still not get the years you assumed you had.
So Ask Yourself, This Week
Not someday — this week. Look honestly at your own trajectory. Know your family's history. Know your numbers from an actual checkup instead of a guess. And then do something with that one lever while it's still yours to pull.
That question — how much usable body do you actually have left, and are you living like you know it — is where my book The Usable Years starts. It's the same question running underneath everything I post on Lifing With Brian on YouTube, where I've been out there since day one of my own retirement, taking notes so you don't have to learn all of it the hard way.
The book goes a lot further than one blog post can: the real math on retiring at 62 versus waiting until 70, whether "buying back" a year of your life is ever worth it, and what nobody tells you about actually building a life once nobody's building your schedule for you anymore.
If that question above got under your skin at all — good. That means it's the right one. Get The Usable Years here and start answering it for yourself, while the years are still yours to spend.
The usable years are now.
Keep Reading
📖 If this resonated, you’ll want to read The Usable Years — the full framework for figuring out your next chapter.
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