Invest in Healthspan Like You Invest in Index Funds
Your health is just as important as your portfolio on your Financial Independence journey. Photo by Alonso Reyes on Unsplash.
Reading time: 7 minutes
Disclaimers: I’m not a financial adviser or a medical professional, and nothing in this article constitutes financial or health advice. I simply share strategies, data, and personal habits that have worked for me. Please consult qualified professionals before making decisions about your finances or health.
I’ve been pursuing Financial Independence for 7 years and writing about it for the last 3—sharing real-world strategies that helped me make steady, tangible progress. This post is for informational purposes only; please consult a qualified adviser for personalized advice.
🌿 Thanks for reading The Good Life Journey. I share weekly insights on money, purpose, and health, to help you build a life that compounds meaning over time. If this resonates, join readers from over 100 countries and subscribe to access our free FI tools and newsletter.
HALE vs Life Expectancy: The Hidden Variable in FI Planning
When most people sit down to think about retirement planning, they normally focus on how long they might live and how much money they’ll need to sustain themselves. But an equally important variable often gets ignored—how many of those years will actually be lived in good health. And if your healthy years end well before traditional retirement age, you may be oversaving—and extending your working career unnecessarily—for a stage of life you won’t fully enjoy.
Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) shows that the gap between being alive and being healthy can represent over a decade. This gap highlights the importance of health on the path to Financial Independence (FI): wealth alone won’t guarantee a fulfilling retirement if health runs out first.
In today’s post, we’ll explore what HALE is and why it matters for FI. A key advantage of pursuing FI is that it gives you the flexibility to bring your healthiest years forward, rather than waiting until traditional retirement age when health may already be declining.
We’ll look at HALE data across countries, examine how work culture and environment affect healthspan, and discuss high-level health habits that could compound like index funds for years to come.
Does your environment enable a healthy and active lifestyle or a sedentary one? Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash.
The Real Retirement Age: Why Healthy Life Expectancy Matters
When people talk about living longer, they normally refer to metrics like life expectancy: that’s the number of years a newborn is expected to live in a given country on average. But that number doesn’t tell us how many of those years are lived in good health. In contrast the Healthy Life Expectance (HALE) metric fills this gap.
HALE estimates how many years a person can expect to live without major illness or disability. The difference between life expectancy and HALE represents the average period spent in declining health—whether it’s limited mobility, chronic conditions, or reduced independence. Let’s use a couple examples to illustrate the difference and how it changes across countries.
In the US, life expectancy at birth in 2025 is 79.6 years, while HALE in 2021 was just 63.9—more than a 15-year gap*. It means that you can expect, on average, about 15 years of seriously declining health—as defined above—before you pass. In contrast, the UK’s life expectancy and HALE were 81.6 and 68.6 years, respectively—a 13 year difference. Not only is the UK’s life expectancy greater than in the US, they can also expect to look forward to, on average, healthier years.
What does the picture look like with countries famous for their longevity? Japan and South Korea’s life expectancy are 85 and 84 years, respectively, with HALE scores of 73.4 and 73.6 years. That’s a 10-to-11-year gap for these countries, substantially lower than in the US or UK. Again, they not only live longer, but also enjoy, on average, a full decade more healthy years than people in the US.
Spain offers another interesting European example. With a life expectancy of 83.9 years and a HALE of 71.1, it shows a pattern similar to Japan and South Korea: long lives paired with healthy years, likely driven by Mediterranean lifestyle factors related to diet and strong social ties.
These differences illustrate that we shouldn’t only focus on the financial side of making sure we have enough funds for retirement—we should also make sure we’re making conscious decisions that will increase our chances of living well—both now and during those retirement years.
Remember that these are all country averages—they’re including a lot of unhealthy data points (i.e., people) in the dataset. If you’re on your path to FI and have the time to care for your health, chances are you can aim for much higher numbers. Without extreme optimizing, I recently used several calculators and estimated my life expectancy to be about 93—two decades higher than the US average.
The differences across countries can’t be explained by doctors or healthcare systems alone—given that they are comparatively advanced across all four countries mentioned. Lifestyle and environment account for much of the variation: daily movement, diet, social connection, stress levels, and built environment all shape how many healthy years people will enjoy.
Health should be a central part of any FI plan. Money gives you optionality, but health ultimately determines whether you can use it. Our most valuable asset isn’t just money, it’s healthy years—which are not guaranteed.
*Unfortunately, we don’t have recent HALE data, so the actual gap may be slightly smaller in practice. But it still helps to compare across countries.
What does your lifestyle look like and what are your eating, exercise, and sleeping habits? Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash.
Why Retiring at 67–70 Might Be Too Late for Your Healthspan
In many countries, the official retirement age hovers between 65 and 70. Consider that for the US and UK it’s creeping toward 67—like many other countries in Europe. Now compare this with the HALE numbers above—63.9 and 68.6. Although these HALE numbers might be slightly higher if we had 2025 data available, the message is still the same.
The average person retires after or right about when they’ve reached their healthy life expectancy. Congratulations—after 40 years of service you are now ready for a short retirement in poor health. Average retirees are exiting their careers and entering retirement with chronic illness, reduced mobility, or the first signs of serious health decline.
Of course, these are averages—many individuals remain healthy and active well beyond national HALE figures. And that’s precisely why personal healthspan planning matters: by investing in your health early, you can aim to beat the averages rather than be constrained by them.
This alone should be enough to sound the alarm bells and push workers towards pursuing Financial Independence more aggressively. Rethinking retirement timing through the lens of healthspan helps align financial plans with real, healthy years—not arbitrary retirement ages set by others for you.
There’s also a financial irony here: many people save as if they’ll have decades of vibrant spending ahead in their late 60s and 70s, but the data suggests otherwise—see our article on the Retirement Spending Smile. If your retirement begins after your healthy life expectancy, chances are your expenses will be far lower than you thought—not because frugality, but because poor health limits what you can do.
In practice, this means you have oversaved—and worked a longer career than was necessary—for a stage of life you won’t enjoy. As I’ve written in my Die With Zero summary, this is exactly the kind of misalignment that leads to unspent wealth, missed life experiences, and experiencing regret in old age. Working too hard and for too long is literally one of the five most common regrets of the dying.
But it’s actually even worse when you consider that 80% of the global workforce dislikes their jobs. Although 20% reports feeling “engaged” in their job, one would assume only a fraction of these experience a deep sense of fulfillment from their career. So, most of us are spending decades of our life in roles that either don’t fulfill us or that we outright dislike—in jobs that deplete our health and energy—only to retire when our best physical years are behind us. Sorry, but no thanks.
This is where Financial Independence strategies come in. Whether it’s full FI, part-time work, or barista-style FI, making conscious decisions about your finances can make a fundamental difference in your life. As we’ve covered in previous posts, making small adjustments in your saving rate can literally cut your working career by over a decade.
The point isn’t to stop working forever at 35. It’s to pull your healthy, flexible years forward so you can design your life around health, family, and meaningful pursuits rather than waiting until the end.
If you think full FIRE is too extreme, another powerful way to do this is through mini-retirements or sabbaticals—taking intentional breaks during your healthiest years to explore, rest, or pursue meaningful projects. I wrote about how to structure these breaks in this dedicated post.
It’s a sobering picture when you lay it out plainly: many people overwork for decades, often in jobs they dislike, to buy status and gadgets they don’t really need, or perhaps a couple of rushed holidays per year. Then they retire sick. Without knowing it, they’re trading healthy years for material consumption. Pursuing Financial Independence offers an alternative: build a life now that allows you to enjoy your healthiest decades on your terms, not those of your employer.
Of course, it’s not just about when you retire—but how you live before and after that moment. What your environment looks like plays a central role in determining your lifespan and healthspan.
* Further Reading – Article continues below *
How Environment Shapes Healthspan and FI Outcomes
An enabling environment is a powerful lever for health—often more powerful than willpower. The famous Netflix show on Blue Zones, which I wrote about earlier, shows this clearly. In the world’s longest-lived communities, health isn’t something people “do” at the gym, but something that’s holistically embedded in daily life.
It means living in walkable neighbourhoods, using movement naturally, and having tight social networks, low stress, and healthy diets. It’s not medical interventions making the difference, but factors related to culture and an an enabling environment that seems to move the longevity needle.
The good news is that we can create or choose environments that support similar outcomes. For some, it may mean choosing neighborhoods with good public transport, bike paths, and easy access to parks or water—so that walking and movement become natural, not forced. You don’t need to drive your car 30 minutes to the gym to hit the treadmill.
Others might opt for rural living, where gardening, manual labor, and daily exposure to nature keep them active and with low stress levels.
Geoarbitrage can also fit nicely here—although it’s not for everyone. It’s not just a financial tactic; it can also be a healthspan strategy. Moving to places with higher HALE, walkable environments, and healthier cultures can simultaneously shorten your FI timeline and extend your healthy years. We explored what this can look like in practice by looking at longevity hotspots such as Costa Rica, Greece, Italy, and Japan—places that combine lower costs of living with lifestyle factors linked to longer, healthier lives.
Choosing a better enabling environment could contribute to making healthy choices the path of least resistance.
Do you have easy access to nature or an enabling environment that discourages a sedentary lifestyle? Photo by Zoltan Fekeshazy on Unsplash.
Automate Your Health Habits Like Your Investments
Just like investing steadily in index funds, investing in your health through consistent, automated habits compounds into longer healthspans. I like to think of it as dollar-cost-averaging into your biological future. In the health domain, I like to borrow Bryan Johnson’s philosophical approach to health—he’s often described as one of the healthiest people on the planet.
Although “algorithmic living” applied to health sounds extreme at first, it can make sense once you’ve internalized what it means in practice. The core idea is not to let any healthy habit up to what your willpower looks like on a given day, but to create a scheduled structure that you follow just like you would your work calendar.
The high-leverage pillars to cover are exactly what you would imagine—diet, exercise, and sleep. According to Johnson, the more you focus on getting sleep right, the better you’ll feel and more likely you’ll be to eat better and exercise, which in turn will improve your sleep—a positive, self-reinforcing cycle. So, if your starting point is terrible health, focus on getting that one right to make the other two easier to achieve.
In my life, I’ve built some non-negotiables into my own schedule. And, counterintuitively, doing this feels freeing, because some of it I no longer need to think about—I just do it because it’s part of my calendar routine. For exercise, I aim for both cardio and strength training. I run every other day—3 or 4 days of slow runs (at a conversational pace or zone 2), followed by one intense session (either hill sprints or a fast run).
The idea is that roughly 80% of your running should be slow to improve your aerobic capacity—which is one of the best predictors of longevity. On easy-day runs, I often stop at an outdoor gym for pull-ups, and I do push ups at home most days. I’m aware the strength component can still be much better optimized—but this is what I have at the moment. I’m trying to incorporate changes into my existing routine slowly to make sure they stick—not to radically design a top-down schedule from scratch.
I eat very healthily, fasting 5 days per week, and focusing on plant-based, non-processed food. Here I do try to incorporate some of the best nutrient foods out there into my daily meals. I also stopped adding salt to meals. It took me 15 years to discover that I’m highly sensitive to salt and it was keeping my blood pressure higher than it should. Dropping the salt has meant scoring perfect blood pressure readings, and your taste buds get used to the change very quickly.
These are just two high-level pillars—I’ll write more detailed posts on each later, based on the state of the always-evolving scientific evidence—but for now the essence is this: don’t rely on willpower and try automating good habits so they don’t require daily decision-energy.
Healthspan isn’t something you can make up for in a rush; like investments it compounds over time. In the last two sections we’ve seen how you can focus on both the enabling environment and on your personal habits. Focus on your health now—it’s our most important asset.
Is your diet enabling a longer or shorter healthspan? Photo by Ella Olsson on Unsplash.
Biological Age and Healthspan: Timeless Investments
The ideas presented in today’s post tie directly into biological age—the age your body behaves, not the number on your ID. While today we explored national averages (HALE, life expectancy), what truly matters is your personal trajectory. Two people can be 60 chronologically but differ by 10+ years biologically, depending on their lifestyle choices. I’ve written more on this recently in my post on retirement planning and biological age.
Rethinking the timing of retirement through this lens is also critical: if your biological age is older, it makes sense to front-load more meaningful, active years—not push them off to an arbitrary retirement date when your health may no longer keep up. If you care about FI, you should care about your biological age at least as much as your portfolio balance.
For me, pursuing Financial Independence is not only about amassing wealth and building optionality—it’s about buying back your most vital resource: healthy, autonomous years of life. The ideas we’ve covered today—understanding HALE, rethinking the timing of retirement, designing enabling environments, and automating health habits—are ultimately about giving yourself the freedom to enjoy your best years fully. Health isn’t guaranteed, but there’s a great deal we can influence through daily choices and long-term design.
You simply can’t outsource or defer healthy habits to a future version of yourself. Just like compounding returns in a portfolio, building a resilient, healthy body and mind takes time. Prioritizing healthspan alongside your financial goals means your FI journey isn’t just about getting to the finish line as quickly as possible, but about ensuring the runway is long, strong, and well lived. Wealth gives you options, but ultimately it will be health which determines how fully you can live them.
Key Takeaways
Know the numbers: Life expectancy isn’t healthspan—HALE reveals the real “retirement runway.”
Rethink the timeline: Retiring too late can lead to oversaving, overworking, and underliving.
Shape your environment: Where and how you live influences your healthy years.
Automate your habits: Steady routines compound like index funds. Prioritize structure and routine over willpower.
Use FI strategically: Financial Independence lets you pull your best years forward.
💬 How do you balance building wealth with protecting your healthspan? Do you focus on daily habits, shaping your environment, or adjusting your work timeline to bring healthy years forward? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
👉 New to Financial Independence? Check out our Start Here guide—the best place to begin your FI journey. Subscribe below to follow our journey.
🌿 Thanks for reading The Good Life Journey. I share weekly insights on money, purpose, and health, to help you build a life that compounds meaning over time. If this resonates, join readers from over 100 countries and subscribe to access our free FI tools and newsletter.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
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Because wealth is only useful if you’re healthy enough to enjoy it. Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) often ends years before traditional retirement, meaning delaying retirement can lead to oversaving for years you won’t fully enjoy.
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Better health typically means lower healthcare costs, longer productive years, and more time to enjoy financial independence. Populations with higher HALE often experience both improved quality of life and reduced financial strain in old age.
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HALE measures the average number of years people live in good health—without major illness or disability. It’s often 10–15 years shorter than overall life expectancy, making it crucial for retirement planning.
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By aligning your FI timeline with HALE, you can retire during your healthiest years—avoiding oversaving for late years when health declines and spending naturally drops.
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Walkable neighborhoods, social connections, low stress, and easy access to nature can significantly extend healthspan. Blue Zones around the world show how lifestyle and environment shape longevity.
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Yes. Moving to regions with higher HALE and lower living costs can simultaneously accelerate FI and extend your healthy years.
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By increasing your financial flexibility, FI lets you reduce work intensity or retire earlier—allowing you to enjoy your healthiest, most active years now rather than later.
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Prioritize sleep, regular movement (especially zone 2 cardio and strength training), and a nutrient-dense diet. Automating these habits compounds long-term benefits.
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Two people may be 60 chronologically but differ by 10+ years biologically. Knowing your biological age can help you time retirement more wisely and plan for a healthspan that matches your FI goals.
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FI isn’t about quitting work—it’s about flexibility. Even if you work longer by choice, understanding HALE ensures your plans reflect reality, not arbitrary retirement ages.
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