AARP expert reveals retirement planning secrets that could add years to your life

Listen and subscribe to Decoding Retirement on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

If you want to add two years to your life, do one of the following: eat right, exercise, maintain a healthy body weight, don’t smoke, or don’t drink too much alcohol.

Do all five, and you could gain up to a decade of health and longevity, according to Debra Whitman, AARP’s chief public policy officer and author of “The Second Fifty: Answers to the 7 Big Questions of Midlife and Beyond.”

Still, Whitman emphasized in a recent Decoding Retirement podcast that the real key to a long, healthy life goes beyond lifestyle habits. It’s relationships. (Watch episode above; listen below.)

Whitman cited Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, who asked 80-year-olds about the difference between healthy people in their age group and unhealthy ones.

The answer wasn’t diet, weight, or exercise. “It was the quality of their relationships,” she said. “And so I took that, as a hardworking mom, to mean I needed to make sure I reached out to my friends, build community, and things that weren’t necessarily just associated with my kids.”

Maintaining and building relationships as we age is critical, especially given research showing that loneliness and isolation can shorten life expectancy.

“Isolation can be deadly,” Whitman said, noting that being isolated has been compared to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

“What connection means is different for each of us,” she said. Meaningful connections could be friends or family members you can reach out to anytime, “or it could be just saying hello to the person at checkout.”

Whitman spoke about another common fear: outliving one’s money in retirement.

She noted that saving is difficult because retirement can last decades, and aging often brings costly needs.

Dementia, for example, can be financially devastating. While Medicare covers doctor visits and hospital care, it does not pay for long-term care, often leaving families shouldering those costs. Whitman said she has spoken with people paying $200,000 a year for dementia care. Even lifelong savers can quickly exhaust their assets.

Medicaid only covers long-term care after an individual has spent down their savings and meets strict income requirements, which vary by state. This leaves retirees facing daunting uncertainties: How long will they live? What will care cost? How will their investments perform? What changes could affect Social Security?