Retirement

There was a presentation I attended at work yesterday on “Making Better Investment Choices with Confident Investing”.  It was essentially about making sure that you save up enough money for retirement.  As my 40's loom on the horizon, this has all of a sudden become unnervingly relevant.  And scary.  Almost immediately after coming out of the presentation, I increased the percent contribution of my salary towards my 401k (the American equivalent of a workplace pension).  For the most part, I have been pretty good at contributing enough to ensure I get the maximum matching employer contribution as well.  But I don’t think this is enough, considering I was relatively late at starting to contribute to my retirement in the US.  But there is so much uncertainty attached to retirement, it’s almost impossible to know what is best.  Who knows how much the investments we make now will be worth 20 or 30 or 40 years down the line?  When will I retire, and how many years of retirement will I have and which therefore I need to save up for now?  Will I even live long enough to reach retirement age?  If I’m going to be honest, I’d rather live my retirement years now – quit my job, go travel the world and see and do everything I’ve ever wanted to do whilst I’m still in relatively good health and state of mind.  Only when the money runs out would I return to work and see out my final days there.  Since that takes out so much of the uncertainty of growing old, doesn’t that sound better?  If only I had the guts to do it!