Saving for retirement has not been on my mind recently.
I used to worry about saving for retirement in my 20s.
Started saving for retirement, through the extremely beneficial pension scheme of UK universities that has just been changed, in my 30s.
In my 40s I worried a bit about saving for retirement but as you, my friend, know what was on my mind was the rather embarrassingly large amount of debt we had accumulated and how to get rid of it. In fact, I thought that I will never have retirement for a short while back in 2010.
Now, I don’t concern myself with worry; I took action. Remember when I told you that we probably should stop worrying about pensions and start thinking about income in our later years? Well, I’ve been building income streams (as passive as one can get, really) like a woman possessed. This is why I don’t worry about pension and saving for retirement any longer: because I started investing for the future.
Anyhow, it matters little whether I concern myself with it or not. What matters is that all statistics show that people in the UK (and the US) have very little put aside for retirement. Which is a very bad place to be given the way state pensions appear to be going.
Did you know that approximately 40% of adults in the UK rely solely on the state pension and have made no other retirement provisions? Even worse 1.4 million of people have no pension savings and are within a decade of retirement.
It is not only about not making – or not being able to make – any retirement provisions. Saving for retirement is also about taking the reins, so to speak, and not delegating your retirement to anyone else. There is enough news about employers pension funds being broke either through mismanagement or through immoral greed.
In this light, researchers (supported by icount.co.uk) interviewed 1,000 people aged between 18 and 25 and asked them when they think they should start saving for retirement.
This Infographic shows the responses they got. The main takeaway from the results though is that people generally think they should start saving for retirement in their 20s but start saving in their 30s.
When did you start saving for retirement? Do you wish you started earlier?
What an interesting findings. We should really start saving as early as possible . Luckily, I started saving for retirement in my 20s but I did not start making other retirment provisions until much later.
Esther, I think you are doing well. I didn’t start before my late 20s (I’m an academic, you see, and education last a very long time if you do a PhD or two :)) and will still be okay. In fact, I’ve been working towards financial independence which I hope to achieve by next summer/autumn. I believe that the important thing is to move away from thinking about ‘pension’ and think about passive income (or as ‘passive’ as possible).