THE RETIREMENT DREAM: What Happened to It?

Go to school, get a good education, a steady job, work hard, buy the ‘dream’ home with a 25-year mortgage, get married, make babies, own a couple of cars, raise the family, send the kids off on their own, retire from the job after 40 years with secure pension…. So where'd the old dream go?

As for the ‘steady’ job – is there such a thing? Due to economic pressures and/or technological advancements redundancy is more common place than we would like.

Typically, we change jobs more frequently than our parents did. Workers today recognise that lifetime employment with one company is an unrealistic expectation. Retirement Planning suffers from all this instability.

As for marriage and children, our generation have waited longer to have kids ... and had fewer of them. More people than in the past remain single into retirement. Our separation rate is higher than generations before us. Multiple marriages, multiple divorces, increase in single-parent households - income levels in these households are significantly less than the incomes of married couples with children.

We do have our homes – but a lot of people aren’t paying the mortgages off. So there's less money in our houses for retirement. There are those who relied too much on the housing bubble.

Now, as we all head towards retirement – Who is responsible for our future?

We’re not responsible for all the changes that took place over the past 30-40-50 years; some were just history in the making. Have we been ‘cheated’ out of something or have we just lived life as it came at us day by day?

We are responsible for lots of the choices we make, individually and as a generation, and now we have to figure out how to go forward.

We expected to live longer. Are we fitter and healthier? Do we expect to be more active in retirement? Have we got more energy than our parents?

What ‘retirement’ means has been redefined over many years. Is it time to look at ways of taking what we have and creating our own retirement picture? What will your retirement look like?

MOORE for your money. MOORE money for your life ...Because we'd expect it!