What are you really saving for and do you think without savings you can still live a normal life after retirement?

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Thoughts on Savings

I think that building up savings is important, first and foremost, for your current mindset. 

Having funds tucked aside means that your stress levels will be reduced as you are not panicking about unforeseen or emergency expenses. The risk of you building up expensive credit card debt is also massively reduced if you can dip into your savings to cover unexpected bills.

Savings also allow you to take advantage of opportunities to acquire assets when they become cheap. A market crash is usually accompanied by cashflow problems for most people, but those with savings can pick up bargain stocks, real estate and other assets (cryptos!) on the cheap. Having savings allows you to feel in control of your destiny.

Another advantage of having savings is that you can think longer-term. You don't need to snatch at short-term opportunities (that might not actually be in your best interests) to meet your monthly expenses. For example, poorly paid work or dead-end jobs. Your savings set you free to pursue interests that are aligned with your long-term goals.

Thoughts on Retirement

I believe that retirement, in the traditional sense, will become a relic of the past.  

None of us will ever 'retire' fully. 

For one, it will become increasingly difficult to accumulate sufficient savings to cover our living expenses as our life-spans increase and secondly, governments will no longer be able to afford to subsidise retirement for its citizens.

Sure, those who carry out strenuous manual tasks for their work will have to stop as they get older, but they will switch to other less strenuous tasks to keep on earning. 

Fortunately, the digital age will present us with millions of different ways to pursue our interests and 'get paid'. The emerging crypto and tokenised world that we are starting to see today is just the tip of the ice-berg.

We will keep on 'working' to earn money to cover our expenses way beyond the current commonly accepted retirement age. This might prove to be an extremely positive change as the current practise of 'pensioning off' many decades of wisdom and experience will be quite rightly put to an end. Also, with life-spans extending, there could be further decades of active engagement and interest for people who might otherwise have been left to pasture under the traditional model of retirement.

So the goal is to find areas of work that we find stimulating and engaging, because we might find ourselves doing it for a (very) long time...