Retirement is a major life change that not everyone is prepared for. Globalization and technology changed how people lived and worked, so over the coming years increasing longevity will do the same. Retirement can be a quarter of our life, easily 20 years or more. Therefore, retirement planning should be a plan in terms of financially and emotionally.

Today we are going to talk about retirement from the financial perspective. Retirement is one of our biggest financial challenges for three reasons:

• The sum we have to save for retirement is bigger than for any other financial goal.
• When we prioritize our desires, retirement never wins on urgency, making it easy to keep putting off.
• Saving for retirement is the financial equivalent of an ultramarathon. When saving to buy a house or to pay for your child’s college education, you might save for five or 15 years, but for retirement, you have to save decade over decade.

What is more, in terms of our priorities, saving for retirement may lose out to other more pressing matters or more enjoyable pursuits. And to make matters worse, we may talk ourselves out of it with unfounded rationalisations, so that we can avoid the difficult task of saving for retirement. Those are the subtle lies we tell ourselves about retirement. Not any more. Be honest with yourself.