Why You Should Stop Saving for Retirement (and Save for Freedom Instead)

Investor and author John Coleman insists there is a better way to organize your financial life than focusing on saving for retirement. 

EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN, CONTRIBUTOR, INC.COM @ENTRYLEVELREBEL

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“Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement,” Elon Musk opined on a podcast recently. Thanks to vast material abundance AI will soon create, he predicted, “saving for retirement will be irrelevant.” 

You will probably not be shocked to hear that the Tesla and SpaceX boss was instantly shouted down by a chorus of experts. While Musk may be a brilliant entrepreneur, his judgement in other areas is clearly shaky. With the future economic impacts of AI unclear, banking on some near term, tech-powered utopia to fund your golden years is a genuinely terrible idea. 

With no one about to hand out free money, it remains essential to plan how you will fund your lifestyle as you grow older. But that doesn’t mean the idea that you should stop saving for retirement is entirely wrong. 

Author, investor, and personal finance expert John Coleman says it’s a goal you should probably give up on, in fact. Not because “fully automated luxury communism” is imminent. But because there is another, much better goal to aim for instead.  

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Save for freedom, not retirement 

Coleman is the author of a new book Good Money, and on HBR recently, he argued that “the traditional retirement model—40 years of work followed by decades of withdrawal from it—is out of step with modern life and with what we know about human flourishing.”

We think we need to scrimp and save in order to stop working. But if you think about what will actually bring you the most peace and satisfaction in your later years, the answer usually isn’t endless free time. 

“Most people think they want retirement, but they actually want freedom. They want to control their time, pursue meaningful work instead of obligatory work, spend more time with family, invest in their communities, and engage in activities that give them purpose. What they want is the ability to walk away from work that drains them—and the ability to run toward work that energizes them. They want agency and autonomy, not idleness,” Coleman writes. 

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