Longevity Rewrites the Economics of Inheritance

Alvin Hellerstein is a 92‑year‑old judge presiding over a high‑stakes case involving Nicolás Maduro.  While once we would have considered this to be an outlier, he is becoming something closer to a new status quo: a highly-trained professional still working at the top of his game, in high-stakes matters no less, well into an age that used to be synonymous with retirement and rocking chairs on front porches.

Yet his continued presence on the bench captures an interesting reality the economy has not yet priced in.

People are living longer, staying sharper and consuming more of their own wealth for more years than anyone expected.​​

Hellerstein is not alone.

Charlie Munger died at 99 after more than six decades as Berkshire Hathaway’s vice chair, still turning up at shareholder meetings and offering no-holds-barred opinions on markets and capital allocation well into his late 90s. Including shortly before he passed.

Warren Buffett, born in 1930, has only now stepped down as Berkshire’s CEO in his mid‑90s and has said he’s not going very far. He plans to keep coming into the Omaha office in his role as chairman.

My dad worked well into his 80s.  Larry Ellison, at 81, is making multi-billion dollar bets on AI and movie studios.

Each of them, and the millions more like them, are treating their 80s and 90s as an extension of middle age rather than a reason to fade into the background.

According to Census, there are roughly 15 million people over the age of 80 in the U.S., comprising a group that is outpacing their younger peers. Census estimates an increase of roughly 28% by 2030 and more than 55% by 2035. In the 90+ crowd alone, there are roughly 2.8 million people — 300,00 to 500,000 more than the start of this decade.

Source: Census Population Projections

For household balance sheets this is starting to sound like “80 is the new 50” as older generations remain cognitively sharp and professionally relevant.

And for their potential heirs, actively deploying capital, aka spending it, instead of sticking it away for the next generation to enjoy.​​

AI and the New Longevity Engine

For most of the twentieth century, people lived longer because living conditions got better.  Water got cleaner, indoor plumbing replaced outhouses, vaccines prevented diseases that killed babies and medical advances improved the odds that adults stood a better chance of living past the ripe old age of 45.

Economist Robert Gordon famously wrote in his 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth that advances in electrification, indoor plumbing and modern water and sanitation systems between 1870 and 1940 dramatically raised U.S. life expectancy (from about 45 to roughly 79 years) and reduced infant mortality by three-quarters.

This decade’s plumbing looks a lot different.

It comes in the form of an AI‑driven health economy that treats the practice of medicine and the development of breakthrough drugs as a systems and data problem to be optimized.​​

Take drug discovery. Drug development and distribution used to be measured in decades and billions of dollars, with most of the so-called promising pipeline dying somewhere along the way.

Generative models and large-scale quantitative systems can now compress the tedious years of lab-based R&D into months. In fact, Excelsior Sciences is an example of a biotech company (backed by major investors) that is developing AI systems that could reduce parts of small-molecule drug development from months to two weeks, and save up to 18 months of pre-clinical time before trials begin. Drug development is starting to look less like trial and error using lab rats and zebrafish and more like rapid‑cycle software development that can precisely simulate reactions to disease states and send only the most promising candidates to the lab for further R&D.  ​​

That same computational horsepower is turning “orphan” disease from a lots-of-luck outcome or philanthropic afterthought into a viable line of business. As target identification and success rates get cheaper and faster, a patient population of a few thousand no longer automatically fails the spreadsheet test.

Some of this rests with the clinical trial process, a critical part of FDA approval process but often an expensive bottleneck. Finding participants can take a long time and be expensive. AI tools speed the process by sweeping electronic health records and registry data to match candidates automatically, stratify them by risk, randomize who gets the real drug and who gets the placebo, and predict who is likely to drop out.  Advances like digital twins make it possible for more patients to get the real drug, while placebo effects are administered to the “model.”

Then there is AI‑augmented preventive care.

Models that triage radiology scans, monitor heart rhythms from wearables and flag subtle cognitive changes in speech or behavior help doctors find problems sooner and make monitoring less onerous by making it remote, often continuous.

Once a “healthcare luxury” only the very wealthy could access, AI makes elite medical concierge practices mainstream through devices that consumers have or are affordable to purchase.

The net effect is not just longer life, but longer, healthy years.

Where 80 really does begin to look, if not like 50, then at least like the “new 65.” A phase where people can plausibly work, travel, invest and spend their money rather than managing their decline.

The Slow Collision With Inheritance

Here’s where the economics of inheritance start to get interesting.

There is a lot of chatter about the coming “$120 trillion wealth transfer,” a mash‑up of projections that, depending what source you prefer, range from $84 trillion through 2045 to $124 trillion through 2048, when you calculate the totals in today’s dollars. It’s a big number.

But those numbers are misleading. What those trillions obscure is the inevitable flow of funds.

Much of that wealth moves first horizontally, from spouse to spouse, not down the family tree. And in a world where 80‑ and 90‑year‑olds are living their best and active lives well into their 90s, their wealth is reallocated from what used to be prime “estate planning” territory.

The spreadsheet sees $120 trillion changing hands. In real life, the balance sheet sees late‑life, longer living spouses spending their inheritance instead.

Breaking Inheritance Economics

The conventional wisdom of inheritance rests on a few implicit assumptions that were pretty true until very recently.

Parents retired around 65. They slowed down, sold their big houses, banked the money and died ten years later. Their 40- or 50-year-old kids, still paying off mortgages, sending kids to college and shoring up their own retirement savings, inherited that nest egg. ​​

Longevity breaks that cycle.

First, it pushes the mortality curve to the right. As more people live healthily into their late 80s and 90s, the age at which major estates settle moves with them. In a world where the median affluent retiree lives to, say, 92 instead of 82, the median age of inheritance jumps a decade, often into the heirs’ late 50s or 60s. That is no longer a down‑payment windfall. Instead it is a late‑career or even post‑retirement top‑up.

Second, it transforms late life from a short, ill‑health‑dominated stage into a long, consumption‑heavy one. A 92‑year‑old judge is not merely alive; she is still earning income, and in a position to spend aggressively on the two things older, affluent people predictably buy — more quality time and life’s luxuries. Time looks like AI‑enabled screening, new therapies as they emerge and premium care that allows aging in place with a high quality of life. Life’s luxuries look like travel, experiences with grandchildren, home modifications and an ecosystem of services designed for independent but supported living.

All of that draws on the very capital that, in prior eras, would have become inheritance or charitable endowment.​​

Third, AI‑enabled health does not just extend life; it extends how long people remain cognitively active. These older spunksters are more likely to start late‑life businesses, fund new ventures or gift money while alive in ways that reflect their own priorities rather than the expectations of their heirs.

The aggregate effect is an impact on the “great wealth transfer.”

Of course, life and longevity remain unpredictable. As much as people may want to precisely manage the last withdrawal of funds from their bank account with the last breath they take on Earth, a lot of money will still move from Boomers and the Silent Generation to their children and to philanthropy. But more of that wealth will move later, and more of it will be spent by the original holders to live their best lives for as long as they are able.

The Charitable Pause Button

Longevity does not just collide with family expectations. It also collides with philanthropy.

Much of the dollar volume of charitable giving by wealthy households has historically been back‑loaded into the estate. A Fed study of high‑wealth decedents found that roughly three‑quarters of the dollars they ultimately transfer to charity arrive via bequests at death, not gifts while alive.

If AI and better medicine make it plausible to live not just to 85 but to 95 in reasonably good health, it becomes rational for donors to hit pause on big irreversible commitments.

Add another decade of viable consumption, the higher costs of aging in place, new therapies, more years of active life — and suddenly every dollar earmarked for charity competes directly with the option to buy additional healthy time for oneself or one’s spouse.​​

Or, in the case of Larry Ellison, a movie studio.

If extended longevity and late‑life consumption trim even a few percentage points off the charitable share of estates, or delay large gifts by a decade, that implies tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in philanthropic capital that may arrive later, arrive smaller, or never arrive at all.​

Where Innovation Matters

The old retirement equation, save enough during 35 to 40 working years to fund 20 years of retirement, with a good chance of help from inheritance, was already tenuous. Add the uncertainty of Social Security for younger generations when they retire, and things look even more iffy.

If the median affluent life extends into the 90s in good health, “retirement” becomes a misnomer.  Many will have multi‑stage careers: a first act in their 20s–40s, a second in their 50s–70s, and perhaps a different third act after 75. Household balance sheets must match that reality. Traditional products anchored to a fixed retirement age look increasingly misaligned with the longevity AI is making possible.​​

The psychology of saving also has to catch up. A generation that grew up expecting an eventual inheritance, explicitly or implicitly, now faces a world where parents and grandparents may reasonably choose to spend down assets to buy additional active years.

But it leaves adult children with a different assumption and a new set of financial responsibilities to plan for.

FinTechs are stepping in as the counterweight to AI-enabled longevity by embedding financial capability much earlier in life, so people arrive at older age with more assets and better habits.

Instead of trying to “fix” retirement in someone’s 50s, kid- and teen-focused platforms turn saving, investing and risk into lived experiences from childhood. Supervised debit and investment accounts let kids earn, save and invest early, while custodial investing and low-fee robo-advisors extend that on-ramp into young adulthood with diversified portfolios and disciplined contributions.

Layered on top, AI is becoming the always-on financial coach most households lack, using data to create personalized nudges that help people save more, adjust risk and stay on track as life changes. Together, early experiential investing and AI-driven guidance form the financial infrastructure that makes longer lives financially viable, not just technologically possible.

In that sense, AI’s most profound financial impact may not be the automation of back‑office tasks or the creation of new investment strategies, as important as those are.

It may be this silent reset of intergenerational expectations. The 92‑year‑old judge, still sharp on the bench, is not just a symbol of good genes. He is a reminder that in the age of AI‑enhanced health, the real “great wealth transfer” might be from future heirs and future charities back to the present owners of those funds.

Spent intentionally and happily on more years of life well lived.​​

Find more observations and insights from Karen Webster about what may lie ahead:

What 2026 Will Make Obvious

Ten Structural Shifts Reshaping Payments, Commerce and the AI Economy