We work, and then we don’t work. That traditional view of career and retirement planning is evolving into something more nuanced, with “phased retirement” and “working for pleasure in retirement” becoming more common ways that people envision their later years, especially today’s younger workers.
According to Fidelity’s 2024 State of Retirement Planning study, the advice of a growing number of financial planners to have something compelling to retire to rather than retiring from your job seems to be taking hold. Apparently, the global pandemic was also a factor, with some 66% of adults saying the COVID crisis “made them more intentional about focusing on their personal passions and dreams in retirement.”
Rather than retirement being a full stop from work, they hope to ease into it, moving from full-time to part-time work before stopping completely. Millennials, those ages 27-42, are especially likely to say they look forward to “pursuing work for pleasure while in retirement.”
The desire for a do-over
One of the most common retirement-related regrets across all generations is not having started saving for retirement earlier. While that was evident in the Fidelity study, there are encouraging signs here as well, with the youngest respondents — the 26-or-younger members of Gen Z — indicating that they did start saving at an early age, and they’re aware that it would have been better had they started even earlier.
Gen Z | Millennials | Gen X | Boomers | |
Age started saving for retirement | 20 | 27 | 36 | 44 |
Age they wish they had started | 18 | 22 | 26 | 33 |
As I describe in Trusted: Preparing Your Kids for a Lifetime of God-Honoring Money Management, many of today’s children could have a huge head start on saving for retirement by the time they graduate from high school. For example, it’s not unrealistic for many of today’s young people to save $3,000 by age 18. If they put the money in a Roth IRA and invest it aggressively, even if they never add another penny to that account, it’s possible that they could have over $1 million available tax-free by the time they are 70.
Now or later?
Preparing for retirement is a balancing act, even for the most intentional planners. It’s common for people to want to travel more in retirement to spend time with their adult children/grandchildren or enjoy certain experiences they didn’t have the time or resources to enjoy during their careers. But it’s also common for many such planners to miss out on what they had hoped to enjoy because of ill health in retirement.
So, on the one hand, if you save too much now, you may be trading off activities you’ll never be able to experience. On the other hand, if you spend too much now in order to experience what you might not be able to experience later, you may be trading off being better financially prepared for your later years. Finding the right balance between those priorities can be a challenge.
What resonates with you in all of this? Do you envision retirement as a full stop from work or something you’ll ease into? And how are you balancing the need to save enough for retirement while at the same time not missing out on certain memory-making experiences you might not be able to enjoy later?
