This operates the opposite. When you are older chances are you have a fixed income. If so, don't have time to take a chance because if you take that chance and it fails to pay off you don't have time to earn it back. You are better to go for the $5 that is safe. If you are younger, if the chance doesn't pay off, you still have the chance of maybe earning it back down the road.
Although I recently saw this happen with my own father. Who, in the words of my cousin who is a certified financial planner, is the "most conservative man I've met when it comes to money." He started to saw things and was looking at doing things with his money that made no sense.
For instance he was holding onto over $1M in cash in his money market not doing anything with it. Then there was wanting to buy and put a trailer down on the farm because hotel bills were adding up. I mean he spent about $800 on motel/hotel rooms. It would take a lot of years to justify spending $40k on a camper or used RV. Also this was his idea incase of an economic collapse. As a man who was a life long registered democrat some of he things he was saying sound even more far right wing than I am. And I maintain a few guns, a water purifier and an electric generator with 20 gallons of fuel and a couple weeks worth on non-periable food. We do live in an earth quake zone and we've been known to have storms that can take out power for a week at a time. Doesn't happen very often, but it can and does.
I thought it was odd, but the man earned his money in his life and I wasn't going to say or do anything about it. If he wanted to waste $40k that was his money and right to do so.
Well then he had a stroke that landed him in the hospital earlier this year. After the MRI it revealed he had been having small strokes in the area of brain that affects reason and critical thinking probably over the past year - eighteen months.
It started to make a lot of sense. Since the more serious, still classified as a light, stroke I've met with the trustees and made them aware of the situation just incase he did start doing strange things with the money we could step in and stop it taking the executorship away from him if we had to. Thankfully he's come around to see some things differently about the farms realizing he can't really go down there anymore for a few days at a time and bush hog or spray or do the other things he enjoyed doing on the tractor. He doesn't have the stamina anymore.
I saw my grandmother squander $180,000 on sweepstakes when she got older. Granted having Parkinson's likely altered some of her decision making processes. Thankfully unlike her, something my father had the forethought of doing was putting everything into trusts with clauses that would allow the trustees and myself to step in if something happened.
Many people aren't that lucky to have someone that savvy with legal and financial matters.