Do you want to know your date of death?

It would be interesting to see the results of this poll & some discussion of the subject.

At my age & current financial circumstances, it would be quite useful to have a good estimate of the date of my death.

I live on social security & do not have significant net worth. I am hoping to die broke. I expect to live 5 more years (no guarantee) & hope to live 10 more. I could last 15, but this is unlikely.

If I knew how much time I had left, I could divide assets by number of months & spend accordingly.

If the number was 36-40 months, I would take a cruise & go out to dinner with my life partner more often.

If the number was 60 months, I could live comfortably.

If it were 120 months, I would have to be frugal and carefully assign priorities to expenditures on nonessentials.

Beyond 120 months, I would have to find an additional source of income or live like a pauper.​

I am guessing at 90 months & intend to revise the estimate every 10-20 months.

Those who are very affluent need only make sure that they do not spend very foolishly.

My father was affluent, not wealthy. He decided that he would not live past his 105th birthday. He divided assets by years remaining to that birthday & spent accordingly. After about 15 years, he revised his estimate to his 95th birthday & made subsequent revisions as he aged. He lived very comfortably until the end & came close to dying broke.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Sorry I messed up on including a poll.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I plan on working until I am unable to any longer. :itold: I also plan to continue a relatively frugal lifestyle retaining as many assets as possible and extracting as much happiness as possible from low - cost everyday pursuits.

Worst case my son inherits whatever is left when I no longer need it.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

We don't have much, and don't need much, but we've decided to indulge in small pleasures as and when the spirit moves us... because, what else is there to live for?
We are hoping to make it last another ten years, supplemented with very modest earnings from home business. Given our health and the political climate, that's optimistic.

 

Geeze all of the calculations and worry about matching the time of your death with going broke seems crazy. I am essentally broke now so I can die any time; mission accomplished.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Remember that as you get older, you will need less money.
Most people over 80 don't need much.

 

The fun would be to tell the date, without the year, or even more fun, it is 4:55 pm....

 

In an Ursula K. Le Guin story, possibly The Left Hand of Darkness, a story is told of a king who asks the wise men when he will die. They go into trances that Ms. Le Guin describes as a 'harnessed hunch', if memory serves. Their response to the king is ,'the 15th'. Of course he wants to know what month and year, but that they cannot tell him, and since they have used all of their 'science' to come up with the answer given, they cannot possibly do more. He asked, and they answered as best they could, and the king was assured of their accuracy. So the king spends the rest of his life growing anxious about the 12th of the month, and completely intolerable by the night of the 14th. The 15th of every month he is truly insufferable.

Be careful what you wish for, boys and girls.

 

I would definitely want to know. Imagine how much easier that would make retirement planning? Working until I am forced to retire seems like a good plan now, but only because I realize the possibility of being 100 years old and having no savings left. If I were to learn that I'm fated to die at 70, that is a significant difference that would allow me to retuir far earier.

I've never understood the sentiment that living in a bubble of avoidable ignorance is better than facing the hard truths of life. So, if the date of my death were available (even if it was unavoidable, so I could do nothing to delay it), I'd definitely want to know.

Plus, if I can't change the date of my death at all, then that is like having a super power. You'd know that you could be injured, but never killed until that very last moment. I'd be curious if the knowledge would take the fear out of things like skydiving. (I assume not, as the emotions don't give a shot about knowledge. Reason is the slave of the passions, not the reverse.)

 

Less money??? I think the opposite. As you get older, maybe you won't be able to work and will need to spend more money in health care and so on.

 

Not if you have government care. Kremmy haz.

We, on the other hand, have a decent chance of being bankrupt prior to death. Yea.

 

I would also want to know the time of death, so that I could void by bowels (as best I can) rather than leaving that mess for others to clean up post-mortem.

 

Though Pandaemoni may be an exception, most of us live in denial of our mortality, quite happily I might add. We all know that we will be gone someday, but it doesn't seem real to most of us. One of the traumas of being terminally ill is that you've been robbed of your delusion of immortality. You may not know your exact date, but when you've been given six months to a year, you've a much better idea than most of us do.

Ask people on death row how much they like knowing when they are going to die.

 

People on death row have other issues, like being unable to enjoy the time they have which skew those results.

Still, for me, better to be on the relatively highly supervised death row of a prison, than in the anal-rapefest that exists elsewhere in the prison system. I'm too pretty for that. I'd far rather suffer death than be the victim of repeated forcible sodomy.

The terminally ill, who have pain and suffering to deal with leading up to their deaths, likewise resent a skewed result.

People are able to acknowledge their mortality just fine when setting wills and purchasing life insurance. Though if everyone knew their date of death, I imagine premiums on that insurance would rise (as no one would ever let a policy lapse, and would only buy one when they started getting a wee bit closer to the big day.

Besides, knowing what day you are going to die also means knowing what days you are not going to die. So, on every other day you can do anything, and be completely sure you'll survive. Maybe not intact....but survive.

 

Life in prison is surely no picnic, but look at how hard so many will fight for that alternative to execution. Many a plea bargain is made by offering life in prison over the possibility of a trial where the death penalty is a possibility.

Many terminally ill people are completely asymptomatic when they first get the news, and with some illnesses, they will remain so up until close to the end. If it were an illness that were completely free of symptoms, I don't think you'd get very far comforting them by telling them that the only difference between them and the rest of us is that they now know they only have another six months.

You could know when other people are going to die; but I don't think the entrepreneur who offered to let you know when you will die, with an ironclad guarantee that you will indeed die on the appointed date, will have a very successful business.

There is no accounting for taste. Some people probably would like to know, and could even use the information productively. With no exhaustive survey to base this on, I still feel comfortable in predicting that it would be a tiny minority.

 

Interesting take on that. Sort of like Bill Murray in Ground Hog Day.

 

Old mom just quit taking her meds, quit eating and drinking, pulled off her oxygen tube and curled up in her bed at the nursing home. I informed her that those actions would result in her dying right quick. She didn't say anything, just gestured for my son and I to go away, then turned her face to her pillow and away from us. She was 88 years old, one month shy of 89.

She died later that evening with her nurse next to her holding her hand. Nurse said she passed peacefully. Considering that she had COPD, Parkinson's, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and vascular dementia it is very likely that she was comfortably numb when she passed in her sleep.

I hope for a 'bug-hitting-the-windsheild' type ending myself. You know - "huh?" then gone.

 

Rather than wondering when we will die, let's ask ourselves when we will start to really live?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

oke: