Some Thoughts on “Saving Retirement”

In early 2019, one of my favorite bloggers, Tim Challies, featured a link on his a la carte page to a Christianity Today (CT) article titled “Saving Retirement.” That magazine featured it on its cover with the full title: “Saving Retirement: The dream of old age as a vacation has failed us. What now?”

I found the article interesting and consistent with my thinking on the subject, how I treat it on this blog, and in my book, Reimagine Retirement: Planning and Living for the Glory of God. The article doesn’t get into practical financial detail — that’s what the blog and the book are for — but its cultural and theological diagnosis is right on target and worth revisiting.

The author, Jeff Haanen, who also wrote An Uncommon Guide to Retirement: Finding God’s Purpose for the Next Season of Life, opened with this:

…as retirement looms for baby boomers, a growing number of them—both Christians and their neighbors—are discontented with current cultural assumptions about it. They’re asking new questions about money, work, time, family, leisure, and a life of purpose.

Challies highlighted this summary from the article:

When asked about their overall happiness in retirement, doubts crept in. They reported a powerful sense of loneliness. Even though they had more time for family and friends, they missed the bonds they experienced at work or ‘relationships with a purpose.’ In short, retirement as a never-ending vacation is, for many, much more appealing before they actually try it.

Seven years on, the themes in that article read less like a warning and more like a diagnosis already confirmed. Here are the main ideas I found in the piece, updated with what we now know.

1) Many retirees and soon-to-be retirees are questioning the culturally defined traditional view of retirement, which portrays it as an endless and carefree vacation.

Many people look forward to retirement as an end to work with the means to do whatever they want, subject to physical and financial limitations. They envision endless hours of rest, relaxation, and recreation with few responsibilities or obligations. This idea of retirement as something they work and save for and therefore deserve is ingrained in modern culture. The media and financial institutions promote it because it’s popular and profitable.

Transamerica’s 25th Annual Retirement Survey, conducted in late 2024 with more than 10,000 adults, found that workers’ retirement dreams remain remarkably consistent over time: travel, spending more time with family and friends, and pursuing hobbies top the list across every generation. At the same time, a noteworthy shift is visible in retirement expectations: 55% of workers now expect to retire at age 70 or later, or do not plan to retire at all, and 56% plan to continue working at least part-time in retirement. Thirty-seven percent dream of doing paid work in some form after leaving their primary career. The “retire early and do nothing” vision is giving way to something more purposeful — whether by necessity or by choice.

The CT article described what I called the “retirement resistance movement,” built on the conviction that the modern vision of retirement isn’t biblical. Piper’s famous words remain as sharp as ever: “Lord, spare me the curse of retirement… Most men don’t die of old age, they die of retirement… Where in the Bible do they see [retirement]? Did Moses retire? Did Paul retire? Peter? John? Do military officers retire in the middle of a war?”

The problem with our modern view is not that it values rest or freedom — those are genuine goods — but that it can easily tip into making retirement itself the goal. We may transition out of full-time employment, but we should not accept the world’s view of retirement as a prolonged time without productive work in God’s kingdom (Rom. 12:2). That conviction is one of the key principles that led me to start this blog.

The article does acknowledge the appeal of the “vacation paradigm” for many, citing Ecclesiastes 2:17 and Genesis 3:17–19 — the spiritual and physical exhaustion that can accompany a lifetime of work is real, and Scripture holds a high view of both work and rest. I think that is the best way to think about retirement: periods of purposeful engagement punctuated by genuine rest, rather than either relentless activity or perpetual leisure.

In the years since I retired in 2018, I’ve stayed engaged — writing, serving in my church, and doing ministry in the community. I’ve also enjoyed some extended travel, including visits to several national parks. That rhythm of purposeful work punctuated by genuine rest is, I believe, what a biblically-informed retirement looks like in practice.

2) There are a lot of questions and doubts about our ability to fund several decades in retirement, and rightly so.

The “Saving Retirement” article was written when financial preparedness data was already sobering. Since then, the picture has not dramatically improved — and in some ways it has grown more complex.

Northwestern Mutual’s 2025 Planning & Progress Study puts the current reality in sharp focus: Americans now say they need approximately $1.26 million to retire comfortably — a substantial target that most are not on track to reach. Among those who have already begun saving for retirement, one in four (25%) have accumulated only one year or less of their current annual income. Perhaps most telling: 51% of Americans believe they will outlive their savings, yet 35% have taken no concrete steps to address that concern.

The Transamerica 2024 survey echoes this: competing financial priorities — debt repayment, daily living costs, and building emergency savings — continue to crowd out retirement saving for many households, even as 76% report saving for retirement in some form through workplace plans or personal accounts.

Many other surveys have reached the same conclusion over many years: many people do not have enough saved to support a prolonged period of not working for pay in retirement. Although Social Security and a pension may be sufficient for some, most will not be that fortunate.

That is one of the reasons I started this blog, and why I continue to write about financial planning for retirement. As I have interacted with boomers my age and younger over the past several years, I have found that many are not as well prepared as they hoped to be. It’s also one of the main reasons I wrote Reimagine Retirement — and why it remains relevant.

I recommend that future retirees plan sooner rather than later: take stock of your current resources and adjust where necessary. For some, that means increasing their savings rate if they can. For others, it means delaying Social Security and planning to work longer if they are able.

3) In retirement, a lack of involvement and engagement with others can lead to loneliness and even depression.

God created us in His image, and we are relational creatures. We need relationships to thrive and flourish. One of the greatest dangers of retirement is withdrawal from the mainstream of life and a decrease in relational involvement. That is one of the most significant challenges for those who experienced meaningful interactions and relationships as part of their work. If their relationships and associations didn’t extend much beyond family and work — to the church and community — then, with the job gone, loneliness can set in quickly.

The CT article’s finding has been reinforced by subsequent research: retirees consistently report that they love their newfound freedom and the end of the daily commute, but doubts about overall happiness often follow. They miss the bonds of work — the “relationships with a purpose.” This is why it’s so important to cultivate family, church, and community relationships before retirement, and to keep them alive and growing after.

Our relationships are also the medium through which friendship, mentoring, discipleship, and ministry take place, which can be among the most fulfilling aspects of retirement. As the CT article noted, “…more boomers see that retirement can be a season of unique influence.” From a biblical perspective, the term elder is associated with wisdom, character, and leadership ability — the assumed fruit of experience and age. Retirement is, in many ways, the season when we are most suited to play that role.

4) Living “on-purpose” is a powerful driver for all of us, and this doesn’t change just because we retire.

After work and the purpose that came with it, finding a life of purpose in retirement can be very challenging. The CT article describes a man who, after traveling the globe, admitted: “The problem was, no matter where I was, the ‘nowhere-to-be’ thing hit me like a ton of bricks… I know there’s a hole in my life, and I need to fill it. Soon.”

We all need a purpose, something that gets us up in the morning and causes us to be where we should be. Retirement can be a tough transition because people get so much meaning and satisfaction from their careers. As Christians, we have one grand and glorious purpose in life: to know God and to love, worship, serve, and glorify him forever. Everything else flows out of that. We aren’t called to conquer the world; we are called to humbly serve others. As another man interviewed for the article said about his purpose in retirement: “It’s not about me anymore.” He described himself as content to work for the success of others. The article calls this moving from “success to surrender.”

5) No one has all the answers about retirement; each of us has to figure out some of them for ourselves.

The good news is that God hasn’t left us without help. He has given us the Bible, which offers wise guidance on how to live in retirement, as in all other stages of life. Precisely what that will look like in your life may be different than mine. But the overarching values, beliefs, and principles we find in Scripture are for all of us.

To paraphrase the end of the CT article: many older Christians are not embracing retirement as an extended vacation, an ambitious change-the-world mentality, or grudgingly taking on the burden of working in later life. Instead, they seek to continue serving God and others as elders in whatever spheres of life God has placed them (2 Cor. 4:16), while being continually empowered and renewed by God’s Holy Spirit.

As I concluded in my book, Reimagine Retirement: “There are many paths a person can follow in retirement. For those of us who have been changed by the gospel, our calling and purpose are already clear: to invest ourselves in the lives of others, both within and without the church, and to persevere in godly zeal as we grow old so that we can finish well to the glory of God (2 Tim. 4:7).”

The CT article concludes: “Retirement needs a new story. Or better yet, a very old story.” I couldn’t agree more. The story of our lives, which includes retirement, should be a gospel story — a story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. It is a story that God is still writing, and we are still living. We do not welcome our frailty and ultimate end, but like the doctor mentioned in the CT article, we do not fear them either. We just keep serving others, as if death is no concern to us.

The Bible has told us so. In 1 Cor. 15:54–57, we read:

When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ ‘O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (ESV)