COGNITIVE DECLINE AND DESIRABILITY OF PROTECTED INCOME
By Chris Heye
Overview
The greatest threat to the financial security of many older adults is not a recession, market correction, or inflation. It is the risks posed by health-related events and costs.
Roughly 78% of adults over the age of 55 in the U.S. have been diagnosed with at least one chronic illness, like diabetes or asthma or arthritis, and 64% over 65 suffer from two or more.1 About 116 million Americans have hypertension,2 and 800,000 people in the US experience a heart attack each year.3 In 2022, about 1.9 million people were diagnosed with cancer.4
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Chris Heye, PhD, is the CEO and Founder of Whealthcare Solutions, Inc. and Whealthcare Planning LLC. Dr Heye is a technology entrepreneur, writer, researcher, and speaker in fields residing at the intersection of physical, behavioral, and mental health and financial wellbeing. After confronting dementia in his own family and witnessing elder financial abuse in friends, he decided not enough was being done to protect older adults. He helped to design and manage a clinical study conducted at the Massachusetts General Hospital that investigated the behavioral and cognitive underpinnings of sound financial decision-making. The results of that study serve as the foundation for the first of its kind cloud-based application that enables adults and their families to more effectively identify, manage, and mitigate health and longevity-related financial risks.
Dr Heye is a regular columnist for the Journal of Financial Planning and is a Research Fellow at the Alliance for Lifetime Income. He received his BA from Wesleyan University and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also completed a post-doctoral program at the MIT Industrial Performance Center.