A little while ago I wrote about The Hundred Year Life which was the book that Kevin Holleron (my IFA) ‘accidentally’ left in The Academy some weeks ago.
You can download the book here if you want it.
This is an extraordinary piece of work about how people are living longer and how they can possibly manage their lives into what will become something entirely different as more and more people live past 100.
But in the first part of the book one of the main concepts is asset management including tangible and intangible assets.
Of course, in the West we’re encouraged to save tangible assets for as long as possible.
The difficulty we have is that in the old 3 stage life as Gratton and Scott describe it, you learnt, you worked and retired.
In that life you usually work for 5 years for every year of retirement which allowed you to save enough money to have up to 50% of your salary as a pension.
That model is dead in the water, good and proper.
And so, what do we do now?
Do we accumulate more tangible assets to allow us to stop at 60 and be retired for 40 years?
That is a hell of a lot of saving.
Or do we look after our intangible assets, our friendship, our family relationships, our health so that we can work for longer and learn for longer and do things that we like part-time which continue to help bring in some sort of resource to allow us to keep going; to stop drawing down on the savings that we have to keep us going when we can’t work anymore.
It’s a fascinating problem to consider and typically one that people just aren’t thinking about.
State pensions will be dead in 20 years’ time and laws will begin to change and people who were happily drawing their pension thinking it was for the rest of their life will find that now it is not.
If you think that this is pie in the sky, remember that in 2008 the government spent everybody else’s money keeping the banks afloat, they will cut pensions at a blink.
And so, what does that mean for us?
For those of us who decide to scramble to accumulate the greatest amount of tangible assets as possible it will probably be ok – because this will kill us early and we won’t have to spend all of our money.
For those of us who don’t it could go either way but I would prefer to choose to believe that we will have fulfilling second half’s of our lives, continuing to work and contribute, continuing to consult with our experience and our knowledge for younger people (for whom there will be fewer) to be able to make the world just a little bit better.
Blog Post Number - 2565
Leave a comment