Retirement
Not because they are irresponsible. Not because they do not care about their future. But because retirement feels like something that happens to other people. Older people. People who have already lived most of their lives. When you are 25 and just getting started, sixty feels like a different lifetime.
By the time it stops feeling that way, the most valuable thing you had is already gone.
Time.
Retirement is not a date on a calendar. It is not the day you stop going to work. It is the day your income has to come from somewhere other than your labour. And if you have never built that somewhere, that day arrives with nothing behind it.
In Trinidad most companies set retirement at 60 or 65 depending on the employer. That means if you start working at 22 you have between 38 and 43 years of working life ahead of you. That sounds like a long time. And it is, until you factor in that retirement itself could last another 20 to 30 years after that.
You could spend as many years retired as you spent building your career. The question is whether you have built enough to fund all of it.
Most people in Trinidad find out the answer to that question at 55. Sometimes later. They look at what they have saved, what their pension will pay if they have one, and what their life actually costs. The gap between those numbers is the first time retirement feels real.
For a public servant that gap might be manageable. A pension exists. It is not generous but it is something.
For everyone else, the self-employed, the private sector worker, the entrepreneur, the contract professional, there is no pension waiting. There is only whatever they built. And if they never built anything deliberately, there is nothing.
Before you speak to any advisor, before you buy any product, before you make any decision about your financial future, look around you.
You already know people who are retired. Some of them are happy. Some of them are not. The difference between those two groups is not luck and it is not income. It is planning.
Think about the family member who retired comfortably and has not had to ask anyone for anything. Think about what they did differently. Did they start early? Did they have multiple income streams? Did they live below their means while they were working? Ask them. Most people who planned well are happy to tell you what they did.
Now think about the retired colleague who came back to work because the pension was not enough. The former neighbour who had to sell the family home. The uncle who worked for thirty years and retired with nothing to show for it but the monthly pension that barely covers the basics.
Those stories are not cautionary tales from a textbook. They are people you already know. They are the most honest retirement planning research you will ever do.
What you will notice when you look closely is that the people who are struggling in retirement are almost never people who made bad investments or lost everything in one dramatic moment. They are people who simply never sat down and built a strategy. They worked. They spent. They got to 60 and hoped for the best.
Hope is not a retirement strategy.
This is the most common mistake I see and it costs people decades.
Someone buys a life insurance policy at 28. They pay the premium every month. They feel like they have done something responsible. And they have. But a policy is not a plan. A policy is one tool. A plan is the strategy that determines which tools you need, when you need them, how much they need to produce, and what the end result has to look like for your retirement to actually work.
Buying a policy without a plan is like buying a hammer and calling it a house.
A retirement plan starts with a question most people have never asked themselves seriously.
How much money do I actually need to maintain my current standard of living without working?
Not a rough guess. The real number. Your rent or mortgage. Your car. Your groceries. Your utilities. Your medical expenses, which increase significantly as you get older. Your lifestyle. The things you do every month that make life feel like a life.
For most people in Trinidad that number sits somewhere between $15,000 and $30,000 a month depending on their lifestyle. And that money has to come from somewhere every single month for potentially twenty to thirty years after they stop working at 60 or 65.
That is the number a retirement strategy is built around. Not around what you can afford to save right now. Around what you actually need at the end.
This is not motivational advice. It is arithmetic.
Money that is growing in a policy or investment at 25 has 35 to 40 years to compound before retirement. Money that starts at 45 has 15 to 20. The difference in the outcome is not double. Because of the way compounding works the difference is closer to four or five times.
What costs $2,500 a month at 25 to build a meaningful retirement fund costs significantly more at 37 to reach the same outcome. And at 45 the monthly commitment required to close the gap becomes a number most people simply cannot afford alongside a mortgage, car payments, school fees, and everything else life costs by that point.
The people who retire comfortably are not the ones who earned the most. They are the ones who started building earliest. Most of them did not start because they had extra money. They started because someone sat down with them and showed them what waiting actually costs.
There is no single product that works for every person. The right retirement strategy depends on your age, your income, your existing commitments, what you already have in place, and what kind of retirement you actually want to live.
For some people that means a combination of a term life policy for immediate protection, an endowment policy that matures at retirement and produces a lump sum, and a whole life policy that builds cash value over time. For others it means something different entirely.
What stays the same for everyone is the starting point.
You need to know your number. You need to know how far away retirement is. You need to know what you already have that is working toward it. And you need to know the gap between where you are and where you need to be.
Without those four things you are not planning. You are hoping.
Before you do anything financial, do the human research first. Talk to the people in your life who are already retired. Ask the ones who are comfortable what they did. Ask the ones who are struggling what they wish they had done differently. Listen to both.
What you will hear consistently from the people who are comfortable is that they started earlier than they thought they needed to. What you will hear from the people who are struggling is that they thought they had more time.
You will not find those lessons in a brochure or a social media post. You will find them in real conversations with real people whose lives are already showing you what the outcomes look like.
Once you have done that research, once you have looked around and understood what you are either building toward or drifting into, the next step is sitting down with someone who can translate that understanding into a strategy built specifically around your numbers.
Every year you wait is a year of compounding you cannot get back. Every year you wait is a year the gap between what you have and what you need gets wider. Every year you wait is a year the monthly commitment required to close that gap gets higher.
The best time to have this conversation was when you started working. The second best time is today.
If you are between 22 and 40 and you have never sat down and mapped out what your retirement actually needs to look like, that is exactly what I do in a free one-hour consultation.
We go through your income, your current commitments, what you already have in place, and what your retirement actually needs to cost. You leave with a clear picture of where you stand and what it takes to get where you need to be.
No products pushed at you. No jargon. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about your future and what it will actually take to fund it.
Book a free consultation at daronjacobsfinancial.com.
Daron Jacobs, RFC, FSCP
Senior Financial Advisor | Daron Jacobs Financial Limited
1-868-759-8359
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