Health span – the missing piece in retirement planning

I HAVE been writing and speaking about retirement planning for the past 27 years. In the initial years of my career, the topics all related to how to accumulate enough wealth to retire.

As my clients became older, I realised that helping them withdraw in retirement had grown more complex, so my firm began to research the subject. In the past decade or so, my work on retirement has moved in that direction – but it was still just about money.

In 2010, I had an epiphany that gave me the conviction that money is just an enabler – it is sufficient to have enough. So, I encouraged people that it is more important to make life decisions first, before arranging our financial affairs to support these life decisions. In the last 12 months, I discovered that ikigai decisions are actually life decisions, so I started helping my clients to discover their ikigai (not based on the erroneous four-circle Venn diagram). According to the Japanese, ikigai is what you will wake up each morning for. It is about living a daily life that is of worth.