One of the first things we do when building a financial plan is decide how long it should run. At Emery Little, every financial plan is modelled to age 100.
That can raise an eyebrow, mostly because 100 feels such a long way away.
Yet it raises an interesting question: what if it isn’t?
For much of the last century, life followed a fairly predictable pattern. We spent our early years learning, our middle years working and our later years retiring. It was a neat structure and, for many, it worked perfectly well, but it was largely built for a world where retirement might last ten or 15 years.
Many people today are planning for something different. For some, retirement could last 30 years. For others, 35 or even 40. That’s a remarkable amount of time: long enough to build a career, raise a family and watch the world change around you several times over. It raises what I think is a far more interesting question than simply, “When can I retire?”
Most people can describe the age they would like to retire. Fewer can describe what they hope an average Wednesday morning will look like once they get there. And yet that may be the more important question.
When clients talk about retirement, very few tell me they simply want to stop working. What they usually describe is more freedom, more time with family, the chance to travel, and the opportunity to pursue interests that work never left room for. Above all, the ability to choose how they spend their time instead of having it dictated to them.
In other words, what many people are really seeking is choice.
Financial independence answers whether you have to work. It doesn’t answer what you’ll do next, and that part is much more personal.
I’ve met retired clients who seem busier than they ever were during their careers: some volunteer, some devote more time to family, some carry on working in a reduced capacity because they enjoy it, and others finally have the freedom to pursue hobbies and interests that spent years on the back burner. What they often have in common is a sense of purpose.
In our profession, we naturally spend a lot of time talking about the financial risks associated with later life: inflation, tax, investment returns, longevity. All important, but there’s another risk that gets far less attention. What happens when the structure, routine and sense of identity that work has provided for decades suddenly disappears?
The happiest retirees I meet are rarely those who simply stopped working. More often, they moved towards something meaningful instead of simply away from something they no longer wanted to do. They had a reason to get up in the morning: something that challenged them, interested them or gave them purpose. Perhaps that’s why the traditional idea of retirement feels increasingly outdated.
For many people, what matters is the freedom to decide: to choose how they spend their time, choose what matters most, and shape a life around what they value.
If we’re fortunate enough to enjoy a long life, the real question is whether we’ve built a life we’re excited to wake up to on an ordinary Wednesday morning, not just whether our money will last.
