Hi, I’m Chris, the founder of 100 Great Years. This is a personal story, but I suspect parts of it will feel familiar.
At 43, I became a dad. From the moment my son, just a few minutes old, wrapped his tiny hand around my finger, I knew he had become my everything.
For the past 20 years I had been quietly following FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) not as a destination, but as a practice. Knowing I was gaining more control over my life, slowly and steadily, was its own reward. I had no number, no date. I just worked, saved, and watched the portfolio compound.
That changed the day he was born.
After four months of paternity leave I returned to work and tried, genuinely, to re-engage. I had a plan. That plan lasted two days. I closed my laptop and told my wife I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t stress about someone else’s KPIs when the tradeoff was less time with my son. I told her that I’d run the numbers and believed we could make it work, and asked if she was OK with that. She’d dropped our son at nursery for the first time the day before and cried the whole way home. “Yes,” she said. “Can you quit tomorrow?”
I know this isn’t where most people are. Years of saving, no major setbacks, a partner with her own income — I know a lot had to be true for that conversation to be possible. But I don’t tell this story to show what financial independence looks like at the finish line. I tell it because that feeling — of having options, of not being trapped — doesn’t start when you retire, it starts the day you decide to take it seriously. The feeling of control compounds before the money does.
But my road to FIRE was far from straight. I studied economics, but no one teaches you personal finance. I missed years of employer pension matching, kept too much in cash, got some bad advice, made some mistakes. But the good news is you don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be good enough for long enough for the benefits to compound.
Becoming a dad didn’t just change my priorities, it changed my sense of time. I feel young, I am young, but suddenly I started looking at my own mortality through my son’s eyes. Becoming a dad at 43 means I’ll be in my 60s when he goes to college, my 70s or 80s if I become a grandfather. If I live to my average life expectancy, I may not even see my son turn 40.
An average lifespan is not going to be good enough.
While I had built financial security with considerable care, I had not given the same level of thought to my health.
I spent the next year reading everything I could, including Attia’s Outlive, Sinclair’s Lifespan, and Longo’s The Longevity Diet. I got a blood test. I bought a fitness tracker. I thought I was in decent shape: gym on and off since my late twenties, well over 10,000 steps a day, eating reasonably well.
The results were a shock.
Not only was I falling short of what I needed, but some of what I was doing was actively working against me. All that daily walking, even brisk, was too slow to count as Zone 2 — yet my running was too fast. And the daily multivitamin I’d been taking for years as cheap insurance? It was pushing my ferritin levels into a range that, left unchecked, could cause organ damage, cirrhosis, diabetes, heart failure.
That was the moment. I had built a portfolio designed to last until I’m 100. But if I wanted to actually be alive anywhere near that age — to be present and capable and happy — I needed to be as deliberate about my health as I had been about my wealth. I needed to know as much about VO2 max as I did about VOO.
That’s what 100 Great Years is. Not a product for people who’ve already sorted everything out. A platform built on the belief that health and wealth are the same kind of problem — compounding, iterative, never finished — and that most people are treating them as separate when they should be treating them as one.
Yes, it’s built with AI. But it’s a human product — and quite a few of the em dashes are mine. I’ve reviewed every article, tested every assumption, and collaborated on over 200 design specifications. I’ve tried hard to make sure it earns your trust rather than just asking for it.
I’ve chosen an optimistic tone throughout. But I’ll say one honest thing here: I’m genuinely worried, especially as a father, about what the future holds — for work, for governments, for the institutions we grew up assuming would catch us. I don’t say that to frighten you. I say it because I think it’s true, and because the response to it isn’t fear. It’s preparation. It’s building, quietly and consistently, the kind of life that doesn’t depend on anyone else’s decisions.
Whether you use this platform or not, I hope you find a way to do that.
And one last thing, worth saying clearly. Health and wealth are not the destination. They’re the engines. What you do with the years they give you — that’s entirely up to you.
Make them count.
