Think about it, we spend the majority of the prime of our life – from 18 to 67 – dreaming of and planning what we’ll do in our twilight years, when our body and/or mind may or may not be up to it.
IF retirement age is 67,
AND life expectancy is 70s–80s,
WORK for 50 years to maybe enjoy 11 years?
What about the people who retired in 2020, when life as we know it changed, when international travel came to an abrupt halt, even travel within our own country became limited?
Once in a lifetime travel and adventures put on indefinite hold.
Those years of working hard, accumulating super, deferring living life until later, when time and money would enable the retirement dreams, all disrupted by the worldwide pandemic.
Even without the pandemic, there are other life challenges that prevent the realisation of the life that has been deferred.
You need three things to realise your retirement dreams:
- Time
- Money
- Health
By the time you get to retirement you may have the time and the money to realise your dreams but what about your health?
Best case scenario, you get to retirement with reasonable health. You’re older though, and the body ain’t quite what it used to be. Those sporting injuries from your youth are starting to create aches and pains; that knee you hurt playing netball is now locking up; walking uphill is a challenge, and walking down is even worse.
If you’re in your 30s or even 40s right now, these things will not even enter your mind, because at every point in life we think that this is how we’ll always feel.
We all tend to take our general health for granted, but the reality is as we age our general health declines, leaving us with ailments ranging from minor to chronic.
We all know people in our lives that have suffered a sudden loss of health or life, there is no warning.
You may reach retirement with your health intact, but there’s another health risk that is not often considered — it doesn’t enter most people’s minds.
As you age, so do your partner, children, parents and siblings. As your parents age there’s a good chance they will increasingly need your care and attention.
You have money and your own health but now you have other priorities for your time.
All through our working lives it’s drummed into us by our parents, our teachers, our financial advisers and the government that we need to build a massive nest egg to make sure we don’t run out of funds when we retire.
Building wealth for our later years is important, but my question is whether there is too much focus on building up a retirement nest egg for the future and not enough on making TIME for LIFE now?
Which would you rather run out of first?
Money or life?
There is another way, it’s called The Carpe Diem Way, the topic and title of the book I’ve spent the past 2 1/2 years writing.