But if we imagine an individual with an expected forty-year working life, and a plan to accumulate enough assets to provide a reasonable fraction of pre-retirement income after they retire, with plausible assumed saving rates and asset returns, we can ask what effect a rise in life expectancy of, say, five years would have on the calculations for asset sufficiency.
Roughly speaking, there would need to be a rise in the saving rate of several percentage points of income through their whole working life. Alternatively, asset returns would need to be perhaps 50 to 75 basis points higher, risk adjusted, through their whole working life. A third possibility is that our representative person could simply accept a lower retirement income.