Who wants to work forever? With morose posts full of doom and gloom, Twitter-using millennials have been expressing their fear of what comes after office life. Using the #millennialretirementplans, they’ve been discussing the once-thought-to-be golden years.
The cloud of despair is a while off. The term millennials refers to those born between 1980 and 2000, so they are at most 37 years old; the average retirement age globally is 66 and increasing every year.
To get a glimpse into how UAE-dwellers fare on this spectrum of future distrust, we asked a few local millennials about what they think about retirement. Here’s what they had to say.
I want an early retirement but with my spending habits, I don’t think I'll even have the luxury of retiring at all 😂
And I don’t think I'll ever be comfortable with any amount I save up because I'll always think it's not enough. I believe the security of a steady monthly income has made it difficult for me to imagine living off a pool that might eventually run out. I just hope I'm smart enough to invest in something down the line. I don’t really see any other way of retiring comfortably in today's day and age.
To be honest I don’t think I’ve given my retirement much thought. When I started working at the age of 20 my parents pushed me to get some life insurance knowing full well that in case I wasn’t able to save much, I would at least have a chunk of money that would accumulate over time that I could rely on. But I save more for the near future like 5 years down the line, rather than for retirement. Indians are big on life insurance and buying property etc. and they use that as means of support after retirement.
I’m not worried about future retirement as I actually enjoy work, but I do worry about saving enough to be able to quit my job and start my own thing. I feel like there’s no definitive line on how much savings is actually enough to be able to quit your full time job and do your own thing. I find that it’s a challenge to save money mostly because of rent costs. I think the only way to save would be to buy a small apartment at some point so that can alleviate the rent costs...but then again buying will drain your savings so I guess it depends on a case by case basis.
I definitely have yet to even begun to think about my retirement. No I don’t expect to save enough for retirement, because I don’t know how realistic that is. I think the key is to find new, sustainable revenue streams you can rely on. That combined with whatever I save should eventually suffice.
I am kind of worried about retirement but not really. It’s not my priority right now. But I don’t think I will have enough saved to retire early - I hope I do. I’m definitely going to try but unless I open a business here and get myself some side income, I don’t see how it would happen.
