Wellthspan Advisory’s Nadine Esposito on designing systems for 100-year lives.
People are living longer than at any point in history – yet we remain dramatically underprepared to live better.
For decades, the conversation about longevity has been dominated by optimism (‘plan for 100’) and technology (‘reverse aging’). What’s been missing is realism: how longer lives actually intersect with health, wealth, work, care, and legacy across life stages.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Living Longer, Better report, more than half of adults admit they haven’t saved enough – or don’t know if they will have enough – for retirement [1]. Meanwhile, the Stanford Center on Long…
Wellthspan Advisory’s Nadine Esposito on designing systems for 100-year lives.
People are living longer than at any point in history – yet we remain dramatically underprepared to live better.
For decades, the conversation about longevity has been dominated by optimism (‘plan for 100’) and technology (‘reverse aging’). What’s been missing is realism: how longer lives actually intersect with health, wealth, work, care, and legacy across life stages.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Living Longer, Better report, more than half of adults admit they haven’t saved enough – or don’t know if they will have enough – for retirement [1]. Meanwhile, the Stanford Center on Longevity’s New Map of Life reminds us that life expectancy has doubled in just a century, yet our institutions are still designed for 70-year lives [2]. And Deloitte’s demographic analysis of Switzerland shows how aging workforces are already testing social and economic systems [3].
Together, these insights make one thing clear: the 100-year life is not a lifestyle trend. It’s a structural transformation – and most models, from pensions to healthcare, are still built for shorter lifespans. We’re investing billions to extend life, but not enough to redesign it.
From lifespan to life design
Longevity isn’t linear. It unfolds through changing health status, financial capacity, and a series of life stages and life events – education, career shifts, caregiving, illness, inheritance, and eventual succession.
Yet policy and planning tools still assume a three-act script of education → work → retirement.
In reality, our lives are becoming multi-stage, multi-career, and multi-biological. Biological age – shaped by markers such as muscle mass, inflammation, VO₂ max, or epigenetic clocks – increasingly diverges from chronological age. Emerging biomarkers – from DNA methylation clocks to proteomic and glycomic signatures – are beginning to quantify these biological shifts with increasing precision, creating new opportunities to personalize prevention and health planning across decades rather than years. And just as biological age can differ from the calendar, so too can social and financial age – shaped by relationships, caregiving roles, and economic circumstances. A 45-year-old supporting aging parents and teenage children faces different financial and emotional realities than someone child-free with identical income and health data.
True longevity planning therefore requires integrating biological data with life-stage and life-event mapping – understanding when people study, parent, care, reskill, give, and ultimately pass on assets and values.
The Lifetime Economy vs the Silver Economy
At Wellthspan Advisory, we draw a crucial distinction between the Silver Economy and the Lifetime Economy. However, it’s important to note that the two are not competitors: the Longevity Economy encompasses both – the Lifetime Economy and the Silver Economy.
- The Silver Economy focuses on the 50-plus population: healthcare, care services, travel, and consumer markets.
- The Lifetime Economy, by contrast, recognises that longevity begins in youth. Prevention, education, reskilling, and health data shape both financial and physical resilience decades before retirement.
Longevity planning that starts at 60 addresses symptoms, not causes. To build sustainable societies, we must invest across the entire life course – enabling prevention early, productivity in midlife, and dignity and purpose in later years.
The new equation: health = wealth = time
Wellthspan’s 5 + 1 Longevity Pillars – physical, mental, social, financial, and purpose health, bound together by time – form a holistic framework for navigating this new reality. Unlike existing healthy-aging models that isolate medical or behavioral factors, this framework explicitly fuses biological, financial, and temporal data – recognising that the true determinants of longevity are systemic and interdependent.
Each pillar interacts with the others:
- Physical health drives earning capacity.
- Financial health determines access to prevention and care.
- Social health reduces loneliness and cognitive decline.
- Purpose sustains motivation and mental well-being.
- And time governs all trade-offs between them.
Extending healthspan by even five years delivers vast economic dividends: higher workforce participation, reduced chronic-care costs, and sustained tax revenues. “Health is Wealth” isn’t a slogan – it’s fiscal logic.
What must change
- Integrated data and life-course design Aging biomarkers, financial data, and mapped life events must converge into integrated planning models. Without this, individuals and institutions are planning blind to how health, income, and care needs evolve across a century of life.
- Longevity-ready employers Companies should evolve from ‘retirement benefits’ to ‘lifetime resilience benefits’: prevention, menopause and mental-health support, flexible careers, and reskilling budgets that reflect multistage working lives.
- Financial and legacy innovation Wealth management must expand from accumulation and retirement income to include care funding, succession planning, and legacy design – the transfer of both assets and values. Future financial products will need to support caregiving breaks, intergenerational housing, and later-life entrepreneurship just as much as pensions.
- Policy shift Governments must treat prevention and caregiving infrastructure as national assets. Investment in longevity literacy, reskilling, and long-term-care innovation yields returns comparable to roads or energy grids.
From hype to action
The longevity economy is already a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity spanning prevention, diagnostics, wealthtech, and long-term-care innovation. But its true frontier is not another anti-aging pill – it’s a cross-disciplinary mindset.
That’s why I founded Wellthspan Advisory: to help organizations e.g. financial institutions, employers, and policymakers understand longevity as both asset and risk. Our mission is to bridge health and finance – empowering individuals and organizations to manage longevity proactively, not reactively.
At the heart of this work is a simple conviction: longevity must become measurable and manageable across life stages. We need to assess how well people understand and act on their own longevity potential – their literacy in connecting health data, financial planning, caregiving responsibilities, and legacy goals.
Only when longevity literacy is quantified can individuals, companies, and policymakers identify where they are strong, where they are exposed, and how to close those gaps.
Because the question is no longer: *“How long will we live?”, *it’s: “How well can we finance, care, and contribute through the extra decades we’ve already earned?”
About Nadine Esposito
Nadine Esposito is the Founder of Wellthspan Advisory, a Swiss-based advisory firm at the intersection of longevity, finance, and demographic change. Wellthspan Advisory promotes longevity literacy through its 5 + 1 Longevity Pillar Framework, helping organizations and individuals design strategies that extend both healthspan and wealthspan – while integrating care, purpose, and legacy into long-life planning.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/publications/living-longer-better-understanding-longevity-literacy/ [2] https://longevity.stanford.edu/the-new-map-of-life-full-report/ [3] https://www.deloitte.com/ch/en/our-thinking/umfrage-puls-der-schweiz.html