Oh I’ll just work forever
You’ll hear it now and then — someone who says “Oh I’ll just work forever” when asked about their retirement plan. That’s their entire plan: just to keep on working.
Now there’s nothing wrong with working. Some people enjoy their jobs so much that they don’t have any desire to retire. But having “work forever” as your retirement plan is pretty short-sighted.
You see, the worst case scenario isn’t that you have to keep working because you don’t have enough saved for retirement. The worst case scenario is that you need to keep working because you don’t have enough saved for retirement, but can’t continue to work due to health or other reasons.
That pretty much leaves you with destitute and at the mercy of the government as your backup retirement plan. Or possibly imposing on relatives that may not be financially or emotionally prepared to help.
Basically it leaves you begging for help from anywhere you can get it, even if it puts the people you love at risk of eventually being even worse off financially than you are.
So if you think that you can’t afford to contribute to retirement now, ask yourself this. How will you afford to eat later, if you can’t work and don’t have any money set aside?
It’s a rare person who really doesn’t have even a spare dollar a week to put aside.
November 11th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Good points here. I think the biggest issue is health – once you are physically unable to hold down a job, then things can get really tight. Better to take advantage of good health and do everything you can to save for the later years.
November 11th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Great topic. I was just suggesting to some friends and family the importance of retirement. They unfortunately live in the now and cannot think about the future. There has to be some pill or something to fix this mentality. My concern is of course your health as you get older, but everything else too. How do you pay the bills you logged? Or just survive on a day to day basis? I could not even imagine.