It’s never too early to start thinking about retirement. But if that makes you think of deckchairs and Bognor Regis, it’s time to jazz up your thinking
Here’s a question for you:
What if you live to be 100?
Now here’s an even trickier one:
How are you going to pay for it?
That promise and related challenge is the centrepiece of a very thought-provoking book I tend to re-read every couple of years, and which I have gifted a lot of clients and young relatives: The 100-Year Life.
Its authors’ argument—backed up by lots and lots of stats—argues that increasing life expectancy means living to not just 4 score and 10 but a century may become a commonplace, and so we’ll fundamentally reshape how we organise our lives, particularly in relation to work, education, and retirement.
As will your children. Which is also a question worth pondering: How will they afford such longevity, and could you make it more affordable for them?
A new and better way of thinking of your life journey
Briefly, the logic is that the long-standing (well, like a lot of things, something that’s only really been with us since the Industrial Revolution) model of life divided into the three consecutive stages of education, work, and retirement really only works for shorter lifespans. In a world where people routinely live into their 90s or beyond, spending 20–30 years in retirement is financially and socially unsustainable. As a result, this linear life model is breaking down, and we have to find new ways of organising long lives, families, all sorts…
But ESPECIALLY the money side. I’ll leave it to the book to outline its specific proposed solutions to the life side (basically, a more flexible, multi-stage approach). But we need to be thinking as soon as we can, really, about the fact that we just can’t rely solely on governments or employers to provide pensions and security.
Instead, the 100-Year thinker actively plans for achieving financial sustainability over a longer lifespan. But you don’t really want financial stability all the way through: you want it for what we can still call ‘retirement’ if you like, but which I think might be more accurately called ‘freedom not to work.’
As in, retirement doesn’t mean you don’t have to work anymore; it just means freedom not to have to work. Retirement also doesn’t have to mean permanent leisure anymore; many people miss work. Freedom is the real goal.
Make all your assets work for you
The good news is that there are multiple ways to achieve not-having-to-work-status, but ultimately it’s about compounding—compounding both financial assets but also whatever creative, interesting, stimulating things you see value in and the evidence suggests they’re worth pursuing.
What you ultimately want here is freedom… freedom to do nothing, freedom from worry, freedom from the morning alarm call. Freedom from the endless circuit of international travel and international business hotels that all look the same. Freedom to spend your days and nights doing what you want to do.
The 100-Year Life argues that longevity is not just a demographic shift but a profound social and economic transformation. It requires individuals and institutions alike to rethink the structure of life, placing flexibility, lifelong learning, and adaptability at the centre of how we live and work.
You can agree or disagree. But I think you have to accept that unless you plan to die in harness or live in poverty, retirement is a responsibility you need to take as seriously as you do your career and health.
Let me help work out what you need to do to cross the financial finish line and make work truly something you can dip in and out of on your own terms. Work to make retirement a genuine 30-year holiday—and that 100-year life to be as fulfilling a gift as demographics, good healthcare, nutrition, and modern science have opened the door to.
In other words, let’s see if we can help you optimise for that in good time, and let our amazing friend capital growth help those last 40 or 50 years be what YOU want them to be..
- This blog is for information purposes and does not constitute financial advice, which should be based on your individual circumstances.
- Past performance is used as a guide only; it is no guarantee of future performance
- The value of investments may go down as well as up and you may get back less than you invest.
- Any rates of investment growth shown, are intended as a guide only, they are not guaranteed, nor are they intended to be either minimums or maximums.