The Price of Tomorrow presented by OCBC is a financial wellness festival held in conjunction with The Financial Coconut and RICE Media to take a holistic, human look at the role of money in our lives.
All images by Benjamin Tan for RICE Media
What do you want your life to be like when you hit 70 to 90? I used to think that if the world didn’t go up in flames by then, I’d simply be happy to be alive. But with rising life expectancy, I’m starting to realise that procrastinating retirement planning is not doing Future Me any favours.
Over a series of panels at OCBC’s The Price of Tomorrow: A Financial Wellness Festival, I quickly realised that I had retirement planning all wrong. Planning for your silver years is so much more than saving up and hoping you die before you run out of money.
For a long time, the dominant life plot ran in three acts: learn, earn, retire. But that script is unravelling. Some people feel like they can never make enough to retire. Others find themselves afflicted with terminal boredom after retiring. Yet others retire, only to find themselves dealing with more expenses than they’d forecasted.
Perhaps we should think of our silver years as chapters instead. Instead of self-imposed pressure to ‘make it’ in our thirties, why not normalise reinvention as we navigate multiple life chapters?
Longer lives mean having to contend with more than just keeping ourselves fed and our bills paid. It also means asking ourselves: what parts of our identity are tied to work? What new identities do we want to grow in the next decade? And the decade after that?
How Would You Spend an Extra 20 Years?
When health issues meant my 68-year-old father could no longer safely drive, his career as a taxi driver ended. It was a sobering reminder for me that sometimes, retirement isn’t voluntary. It’s forced upon you.
You put your head down and work hard, because it’s all you know. Then, all of a sudden, you’re forced to confront what life means after work.
For a while, his life consisted of watching Chinese dramas on his iPad and cycling around our neighbourhood to play Pokémon Go. Sounds like an idyllic existence, but I could tell that he was getting restless. After all, he’s still got a few good decades left in him (hopefully), and there’s only so many wild Pokémon out there to catch.
He’s still figuring things out, but in the meantime, he’s also been passing the time with SkillsFuture courses. Still, the unspoken assumption is that it’s going to be difficult for him to secure a job at his age.
That’s probably why this question from panellist Brandon Lee, the assistant chief executive at Workforce Singapore (WSG), stuck with me.
“Imagine you have 100 years. How would you use that time to do different things, to reconfigure?”
“If you look at me, I’m 52 this year, with the experience that I’ve had in all the different work [I’ve done],” Lee continues. “Maybe it’s also time to remix it into something new for the remaining 40 years.”
Mature workers often find it difficult to restart their careers after job loss or after taking career breaks. But the fact of the matter is that they still have decades to go. So how do you find purpose when a large chunk of society has decided that you’re over the hill?
Loh Pui Wah, the former Director of Career and Attachment Office at Nanyang Technological University, who has retired but still provides consulting services, quipped: “I don’t use the word ‘old’. We seniors are vintage. We get better as we age.”
Retirement doesn’t have to mean doing nothing, Loh also said. It just means you’re releasing yourself from the burdens of providing for your family and of societal expectations. You could start a business, volunteer, or simply do things that you find fun.
Death and taxes are famously life’s greatest inevitabilities. But so is ageing. One of the panel’s most powerful insights came from Lee, who said, “All of us are going to be older. So ageism is actually discrimination against your future self.”
In an ideal society—at least, the society I hope I grow old in—we don’t see age as a barrier, but as a resource and an opportunity for continued growth, learning, and impact. If we cling to old stereotypes—seeing the young as inexperienced or the old as irrelevant—it does all of us zero favours.
Lifelong Learning
If there’s one buzzword that’s been repeated ad nauseam over the last few years, it’s ‘lifelong learning’, often uttered in tandem with ‘upskilling’ and ‘future-proofing’. But truthfully, all this is easier said than done.
Shir-li Torrey, the founder of Mums@Work, highlighted the reality behind all these buzzwords, sharing that when you’re juggling the needs of children and ageing parents, your personal development sometimes takes a back burner.
But there’s hope. And as we’re hopefully living longer lives, there’s also time.
“You almost feel that every day you’re living life for other people…but one day you will live for yourself again,” Torrey told the audience. At any age, it’s possible to envision new phases for growth, she emphasised.
Having an extra 20 years to live means having a longer runway for growth, the panellists unanimously agreed.
Torrey recounts how she decided to expand into Japan after establishing a successful community for working mothers in Singapore. The poor attendance at her first few events was “humbling”, she said, and she even faced scepticism from her own team. But instead of retreating, Torrey said she saw the setbacks as lessons for future success.
“If I didn’t fail, I wouldn’t know this. Every time the failure came, I asked: What did we do wrong, and what can we do differently now?”
All that is to say that Torrey advocates embracing the unknown, even late in your career.
Indeed, growth doesn’t have an expiration date. Whether it’s learning to use new technology, launching a side business, or simply rethinking work-life balance as a caregiver or retiree, new chapters can unfold at any time.
The key is to remain open to learning, to see setbacks as stepping stones, and to keep asking: “What else is there to try?”
Just a Phase
We often underestimate the years ahead of us. Whether we’re embarking on a first career, navigating midlife pivots, or entering retirement, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking our best chances have passed. But planning for retirement with that mindset sets us up for a miserable time.
Empowerment also begins at home, not just by guiding kids to be unfraid of each chapter of life, but also by equipping them to forge their own way. This also means early, honest conversations about hard topics like finances, guardianship, and death.
Besides finding joy in our retirement years, we should ensure that each new generation is prepared not only to navigate a changing world but also to shape it for the better. At least, that’s what I wish my parents had told me before I got to my thirties. Well, at least I’ve got 70 more years to put this into practice.
A long life is not just more years to fund. There is more opportunity to reinvent ourselves. As Loh noted, “You have time. And when you have time, you can experiment.”
