1 page ; The utility of personality measures as predictors of distal outcomes (e.g., mortality, longevity) is well-documented. Few have reported on more proximal outcomes; one prominent exception (Weston, Hill, & Jackson, 2014) considered personality predictors of chronic disease onset. We report here on efforts to (1) replicate their findings in a second cohort of participants from the Health and Retirement Study and (2) extend their analyses to evaluate the effects of socioeconomic factors. For 7 chronic diseases and the Big Five scales, the only significant measure in both samples when controlling for SES was Openness as a protective factor in the development of a heart condition. SES, by contrast, was a significant predictor in more than one-third of the models. We also demonstrate methods for empirically deriving outcome-specific scales with substantially improved predictive utility and advocate for broader use of these methods when prediction is more important than taxonomic description.