Imagine Your Entire Financial Life Compressed Into a Single Day

​​​​You’ve heard of the biological clock – but did you know about your financial clock? Raising the money for life’s milestones takes time, and that time is more limited than you think. See what your life might look like if you lived it in just one day. The clock is ticking…

Want to know something we’re really bad at? A proper sense of time. Most people find this difficult – for instance, a 45 year old might feel that they have ages to go before retirement, and that retirement isn’t so very long. In fact, this person would probably retire in 20 years’ time, but could easily spend 25 more years being retired. Yet this same 45 year old has been working and earning for only around 25 years.

To make it even clearer, we’ll condense a lifetime into a single 24-hour day. You’re born at midnight and you’ll die on the following midnight. Let’s say you’ll live until you’re ninety, so each hour is a little under four years of your life. Ready?

Daybreak – your alarm goes off

Up until now you’ve just been growing up. This is the moment when you leave the house to go to work. It’s 5.30am and you’re 21 years old. It’s an early start because you have a long commute: a long way to go before you find a fulfilling career.

Your commute

Fast-forward to 6.45am. You’re still on the train. That’s you, aged 25 now, in a job that’s taking you places but which isn’t your ultimate destination. But you can’t wait until you arrive at your dream job – you have to start saving now. By this time you should have begun to save into either an employer’s pension or a personal pension scheme. After all, you have less than a day to build up your retirement fund.

Reaching your office

You get in early – you’re at your desk by 8am, aged 30. You could be buying your first home around this time, although recent surveys suggest that you might not have saved enough until about half past nine (that’s 36 years old) or even later. You haven’t had much time to save for a deposit, so you’ll probably need professional advice to secure the mortgage you want.

Time for some real work

The proper working day starts at 9am. You’re 34 – perhaps the age at which you’ve settled into the career of your choice. But don’t get too comfortable at your desk. This is also the age at which many people start a family, with all the costs of raising children. If you’ve chosen to marry (always best for inheritance purposes) then that’s another big chunk out of your savings.

And it’s still only 9 o’clock. Is it encouraging or scary to find you still have most of the day ahead of you?

Lunchtime

Assuming you start a family around 9am, then by lunchtime your eldest will be starting secondary school, and will already have cost you about £40,000 in childcare alone, with another £40k+ of miscellaneous expenses on top of that. Better make it a cheap sandwich.

Afternoon comes around

It’s just gone half past two. Remarkably you’ve already reached pensionable age, 55 years old, so in theory you could leave the office early for an afternoon tipple while the sun’s out. But would you have enough cash to party until midnight? It’s looking doubtful.

Home time

Aptly, at half past five you hit your chosen retirement age of 65, and it’s time to leave the office. You go home to have dinner and put your feet up. But there’s still six and a half hours of your day remaining – 25 years of retirement if you live until you’re 90. Have you saved enough in your pension to last you that long? Only time will tell.

If you would like to talk about any of the issues in this article or need more general help with your finances, please get in touch with us.

This article first appeared on Unbiased.