Beyond the Savings Account: What MIT AgeLab's New Longevity Tool Reveals About How People Plan for Aging

If you ask most people whether they have planned for aging, the honest answer is usually: financially, more or less.

They have a 401(k). Maybe a long-term care policy. A rough sense of when Social Security might make sense to claim. The financial dimension of aging is where the planning industry has lived for decades, and most of the public has followed its lead.

But MIT AgeLab has just made something visible that practitioners in aging-in-place fields have known for a long time: financial readiness is one domain. There are seven others. And for most people, the others - including the home they live in - have received almost no systematic attention at all.

The MIT AgeLab Longevity Preparedness Index, developed in partnership with John Hancock, is a free, 15-minute self-assessment tool that measures aging readiness across eight life domains. It is publicly available, it is credible, and it is the kind of tool that changes the dynamic of a client conversation before the professional ever has to make a case.

This piece is for the professionals who work in the domain MIT just formally named.

What the Longevity Preparedness Index Actually Measures

The MIT AgeLab Longevity Preparedness Index covers eight domains of readiness: financial preparation, health and wellness, daily activities and independence, housing and home environment, social connections and relationships, family and caregiving, purpose and engagement, and legal and estate planning.

The financial domain is one of eight. Not the whole picture - one-eighth of it.

What this framing does, coming from an institution like MIT AgeLab and a mainstream distribution partner like John Hancock, is give professional legitimacy to a set of readiness questions that most clients have either never been asked or have been too quick to assume they could handle later. The home environment domain is particularly consequential. It asks not whether someone owns their home or has equity in it, but whether the home itself is prepared to support them as they age - whether it is functional, safe, and genuinely livable for the long term.

That is exactly what aging-in-place professionals are trained to assess.

The Gap That Professionals Already Know

Every occupational therapist who has conducted a home assessment knows what it looks like when a client has done thoughtful financial planning but has never considered the home environment question.

The home is old - often 40 or more years old, built before universal design principles shaped residential specifications. The bathroom has a tub but no walk-in shower option and no grab bars. The entry has steps. The kitchen storage is calibrated for someone who stands and reaches without restriction. The light switches are standard height, the door handles are round knobs, and the laundry is in the basement.

None of this was a problem at 65. At 78 or 82, after a change in balance, a joint replacement, or a vision shift, each of those design choices becomes a daily friction point - or worse, a hazard.

The Longevity Preparedness Index makes this visible in a structured, credentialed way that most professionals have not previously had available to them. A client who scores well on the financial domain and low on the home environment domain now has a neutral, third-party framework telling them what their OT, their builder, or their designer has already been trying to say.

The professional no longer has to make the case from scratch. The tool makes it. The professional interprets what it found and explains what to do about it.

What a Low Home-Readiness Score Looks Like in Practice

Low home-readiness is rarely dramatic. It does not look like a neglected property or a dangerous living situation. In most cases, it looks like a well-maintained home that was designed for a younger version of the person now living in it.

Here is what practitioners typically observe in those homes:

• Bathrooms are the most consistent finding. Standard tub-shower combinations require stepping over a threshold and lowering into a tub - movements that become progressively less reliable with age, particularly after any change in lower body strength or balance. Grab bars are absent in most homes that have not been specifically modified. Toilet heights are standard, which means getting up from a low seat is harder than it needs to be.

• Entry points are the second most common area of concern. Steps at the front door - even two or three - represent a genuine accessibility limitation for anyone using a mobility aid, managing fatigue, or navigating icy or wet conditions. Many entries have no covered porch, no lighting calibrated for someone with aging vision, and no railing on at least one side.

  
  

• Interior circulation tends to reflect older doorway widths and turning radii that do not accommodate a walker or wheelchair, even temporarily. Hallways, bathrooms, and bedroom doorways in homes built before the 1990s often fall short of current accessible design standards - not because anything went wrong, but because those standards simply were not in the specification when the home was built.

None of these are catastrophic findings. All of them are addressable by a trained professional. The Longevity Preparedness Index gives clients a framework to recognize that their home - however much they love it - may be holding them back in ways they have not yet had to confront.

The Referral Opportunity This Tool Creates

There is a professional implication worth naming directly.

Financial advisors have been thinking about longevity for years. Retirement planners, elder law attorneys, and estate planning professionals are all, in some form, in the business of helping clients prepare for a longer life. What the MIT AgeLab LPI does is formalize the connection between their domain and ours.

When a financial advisor's client takes the LPI and scores low on the home environment domain, that advisor now has a structured reason to refer to someone who can actually address it. That professional is an occupational therapist who does home assessments. A CAPS-certified builder or remodeler who specializes in aging-in-place modifications. A designer with training in universal design and residential accessibility.

This is a referral pathway that has always existed in principle. The LPI gives it a common language.

The practical implication for professionals: the financial and legal service providers in your market now have access to a tool that will surface home environment deficits for their clients. Being the professional they call when that happens is a positioning question, not just a competency question. It requires being known - by the financial planner, the elder law attorney, the real estate agent - as the person who handles the home side of the readiness conversation.

CAPS training is specifically structured to develop that professional positioning alongside the technical knowledge. The home assessment framework, the client communication skills, and the credentialing that signals expertise to referral sources are all part of what the curriculum delivers. When a financial planner's client scores low on home environment, the credentialed professional gets the call.

How to Use This Tool With Clients

The practical question is how to integrate the LPI into professional practice without making it feel like homework.

The most straightforward approach is to reference it proactively in the context of an existing client relationship. For an OT conducting a home assessment: 'MIT AgeLab just released a free tool that looks at aging readiness across eight areas of life, including the home. Before our assessment, or as a follow-up to it, it might be worth 15 minutes of your time. It puts what we are doing together into a broader context.' That framing - as context, not as a sales tool - tends to land well with clients who respond to credentialed sources.

For a builder or remodeler in initial client consultation: the LPI offers a pre-conversation frame. A client who has already identified their home environment as an area of low readiness is far more open to a modification scope conversation than one who is engaging with the question cold.

For real estate professionals working with clients 55 and older: the LPI creates a natural opening in a conversation about whether a current home should be modified or whether a buyer should be evaluating an acquisition for aging-readiness. The tool does not do the assessment - it creates the recognition that an assessment is warranted.

The MIT AgeLab Longevity Preparedness Index is free and takes approximately 15 minutes. It is credible enough to share without qualification. That combination is rare and genuinely useful. Direct link: https://agelab.mit.edu/retirement-and-longevity-planning/projects/the-longevity-preparedness-index/

About Fritzi Gros-Daillon

Fritzi Gros-Daillon, MS, CAPS, ECHM, SHSS, is an NAHB Master Instructor and 2019 NAHB Educator of the Year. She teaches every CAPS course personally.

Upcoming CAPS sessions - CAPS I: Wednesday May 20 and Friday May 22, 2026 | CAPS II: May 20-21, 2026 | CAPS III: May 22, 2026. All sessions 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM PST via Zoom.

View the schedule and register at householdguardians.com/caps-training.

For practitioners navigating a complex aging-in-place project with a client or family, Fritzi offers one-to-one professional consulting.