Mature businesswoman looking out of window.
getty
Retirement security and financial security used to mean the same thing. Save enough, invest wisely, and the rest would follow. That equation has not changed. The world it was built for has.
Zoe retired 10 years ago. Not all at once. She eased into retirement, working part time for several years before finally leaving work behind.
She had plans. More time with her grandchildren. Trips she and her husband had postponed for years. Lunches with friends. Volunteer work. The freedom to decide what each day would be.
As she put it: “I earned this.”
Then I asked what retirement had actually been like.
She looked away for a moment before answering. “I didn’t expect this.”
Confused, I asked, “What didn’t you expect?”
She paused. “Everything. Just name it. The pandemic. Inflation. The grocery bill. Gas prices. The wars. It just keeps coming.”
Then she said something that stayed with me.
“Everything is so complicated. It’s hard to get your head around it, let alone pay for it.”
I don’t think Zoe was talking only about money. I think she was describing something many retirees recognize but struggle to explain.
Retirement Is Not Immune To Events
In just the past six years, retirees have lived through a global pandemic, supply chain disruptions, the highest inflation in years, geopolitical conflict, rapidly changing technologies, and increases in the cost of everyday life.
In the news, each event is discussed individually. That is not how retirement feels. Retirement feels like living through all of them at once.
The next disruption arrives before the previous one has ended. Before a new routine can be set, something else changes. Before a feeling of “I got this” returns, another adjustment is needed. Some retirees describe life as overwhelming. Many, like Zoe, describe years of continuous adjustment. Unlike how retirement is imagined and planned for, life simply never seems to settle down.
I have begun thinking about this as the Stacking Problem — not because crises themselves are new, but because they increasingly arrive, stick around longer, and overlap. In my recent article in the Journal of Financial Planning, I argue that longer lives are creating a new form of longevity risk based not simply on your lifespan outliving your wealthspan, but on repeated exposure to disruption.
The Retirement We Expected Vs. The One We Got
For decades, retirement planning has focused on one essential question: Will I have enough money? It remains one of the most important questions anyone can ask. But longer lives suggest another.
Will I be prepared for everything else?
Financial planning helps people prepare for market uncertainty. We have devoted far less attention to preparing people for uncertainty in life itself.
Consider recent years. How many retirees anticipated learning entirely new technologies simply to access healthcare? Helping adult children through financial uncertainty? Adjusting household budgets multiple times? Reconsidering travel because costs rose unexpectedly?
None of those events alone defines retirement. But together, they change the experience of it.
When Recovery Time Shrinks
Every generation and life stage experiences economic stress, wars, technological change, and political uncertainty. What feels different today is not simply the number of disruptions. It is the shrinking time between them.
Recovery time itself has become scarce. Longevity has increased the years of retirement. It has not extended the time available to recover from repeated events where some simply require adaptation and others are shocks.
That changes the meaning of time in ways that are easy to underestimate. Consider the six years since the pandemic. Six difficult years at age 30 are significant. Six difficult years at 75 redefine retirement and life itself.
A younger person has decades to rebuild savings, recover professionally, postpone plans, and simply wait for circumstances to improve. The same five or six years represent a far greater proportion of life remaining in retirement.
The challenge is no longer simply enduring disruption. It is adapting to disruption that rarely pauses long enough to allow recovery.
Longevity Planning, Not Just Retirement Planning
For decades, preparedness meant saving enough, investing wisely, paying down debt, and entering retirement financially secure. Those remain essential. But longer lives are changing what it means to be prepared. Retirement planning now requires longevity planning — preparing for the long game of more years of life and all the things that life exposes us to. Accepting that retirement may promise earned time and leisure, but it will also require flexibility, regular adaptation, and support systems that many of us take for granted until we find they are missing just when we need them most.
At the MIT AgeLab, we have spent several years studying what preparedness means in practice. The MIT AgeLab–John Hancock Longevity Preparedness Index has made one finding increasingly clear: Preparedness extends well beyond finances. Health, housing, social connections, purpose, care, community, and the capacity to adapt all shape whether retirement feels secure, regardless of what a financial model projects. A retirement portfolio can remain healthy. A household can still become exhausted.
Resetting Expectations In Older Age
Months after our conversation, I found myself thinking about what Zoe had said.
“I didn’t expect this.”
The more I thought about it, the more I realized she wasn’t talking about inflation, or the pandemic, or rising insurance premiums. She was talking about expectations.
For decades, we prepared people to finance longer lives. The next challenge is preparing people for what to expect — and to live them.
