I’ve known Kevin Holleron (who provides my family and work financial advice) for getting on towards somewhere around 15-20 years.
I’ve developed a massive high-trust relationship with Kevin and I really trust everything he suggests and advises because he absolutely changed my families life and then changed my working life through the advice that he gave me and the ability to understand money better.
Recently, and by accident (or was it) Kevin left behind The 100-Year Life by Andrew J Scott and Lynda Gratton in the Academy one day when he was there meeting delegates and I picked it up and then I read it and yet again it changed my attitude towards money and in particular towards money for my children.
The 100-Year Life is a very compelling and very, very well sourced book based around the increased life expectancy of middle class people in the western world.
I have 2 nephews under the age of 5 and both of them have a life expectancy approaching 70% chance of reaching 100.
My children’s life expectations of reaching 100 are better than 50/50 and that entirely changes the whole of society.
In the old model of learn, work, retire you were expected to work for approximately 40 years and then retire for 8 and then die which meant you worked 5 years for every 1 year of retirement.
Imagine Callum exiting university in 2031 aged 23 with 77 years left to live.
He could work for 40 years and still have 37 years to try to financially make it through retirement.
That is utterly impossible to calculate.
So, for people like Callum and anyone younger than him, why would you go to university at 18 or 19?
Why would you not take 5 years to investigate and think about what you might do and travel and explore and meet different people from different backgrounds and try different jobs in different areas before you committed to going into debt to learn about something.
If you’re able to make some money of any kind by the time you’re 30, you would find somewhere that you could get 7% return on your money (and there are plenty of places) and understand the value of the money you saved would double by the time you were 40.
If you were in your 30’s and you didn’t like your job, you would change it, you would retrain and go into an entirely different career that you did like.
If you were in your 40’s, you would probably do the same.
If you’re in your 50’s and didn’t have any money to retire you would understand you would be working for another 35 years to give you (hopefully) 15 years of peace and retirement.
You would also understand that you would be healthier for longer and the 85 year olds would be similar to many of todays 60 or 65 year olds.
Of course, considering the 100 Year Model for our children makes us reconsider the model for ourselves.
I qualified from dental school at 22 and immediately tried to opt out of the NHS superannuation pension scheme because I wanted to spend the payments on beer.
It was only the hard efforts of some very clever people who managed to convince me to stay in and god knows I’m grateful for that now.
I have no interest in retiring when people say or think I should retire because I don’t have a job that I want to run away from.
If you find you do, then you should run away whatever age you are because there is always the opportunity to make money doing something for anyone with health and so you should protect your health in order to protect your ability to make money doing the job that you don’t hate.
As I think of retirement I always seem to return to Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and the chapter of the clones who work at McDonalds in a dystopian future, who are promised the vision of retiring to Hawaii (wherever that might be in the book) when in fact they’d be put on a ship and chopped to pieces and recycled into new clones at the end of their working life.
Frank Turner put it best (for me) when he talked about ‘working 50 years away on something that you hate).
If you’re 30 and you hate your job, you can change it and retrain. If you’re 40 and hate your job, you can do the same. If you’re 50 and you hate your job, you can stop it and do something else and if you’re 60 and you hate your job then stop.
Too often in my life now I’ve heard the words spoken from people that I know or respect or trust that they just have to manage a few more years for the sake of their pension.
Go and shop in Lidl instead of Waitrose and join a library instead of Amazon Prime.
Blog Post Number - 2900
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