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Hoping the Last Check Bounces … and Other Financial Approaches to a Long Life
Americans are increasingly dealing with a dilemma: How to balance a long life with having enough money to live it happily.
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Dadu Shin
By
Ellen Rosen
April 28, 2026,
12:11 p.m. ET
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Brendan McNamar, a poker dealer who lives in Arizona, doesn’t gamble when it comes to finances.
Mr. McNamar made a living playing poker. But after getting married 10 years ago at 47, he began to reassess his financial situation. At the time, he said, he owned a modest house and his wife had significant student debt. “We looked at everything and decided that we really needed to plug some big holes in our retirement savings.” And that caused him to rethink his career.
“There’s something called variance in playing — it’s the same thing as the variance in stock market returns,” he said in an interview. “You lose for an extended period of time, even though you are doing the right thing. Just like you can invest in stocks but be in a bad market.”
That variance — essentially the fluctuations in outcomes — led Mr. McNamar to switch from playing to dealing poker. He became a casino employee, which gave him income certainty and access, for the first time, to a 401(K) retirement account. “In dealing, while a lot of income comes from tips, I can predictably know what I’m going to make,” he said. “The variance goes away and paying bills becomes less stressful.”
Individuals are now grappling with a financial dilemma: the longevity bonus of an increased life span versus the longevity risk that an individual’s finances won’t cover those extra years, said
Mark S. Walton
, an executive educator and journalist and the author of “The Longevity Bonus.”
The
Stanford Center on Longevity
suggests that planning requires a change in analysis. Rather than looking at a life span in three parts — education, career and retirement — the center suggests viewing life in quadrants, a concept proposed by the British professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew J Scott, authors of “
The 100-Year Life — Living and Working in an Age of Longevity.
”
But financial approaches to planning for a centenarian life vary.
Charles Feeney
, the billionaire co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, famously once said
“I want my last check to bounce.”
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