Retirement Now Needs 25 Years of Funding. Here’s What That Actually Changes.

Life expectancy is rising, family support is thinning out, and “save until 65” isn’t the plan it used to be.

Retirement Now Needs 25 Years of Funding. Here’s What That Actually Changes.

Life expectancy is rising, family support is thinning out, and “save until 65” isn’t the plan it used to be.

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My daughter asked me last week how long I think my money needs to last once I stop working. I gave her a number off the top of my head. Then I actually sat down and did the math properly, and the real number was bigger than what I’d guessed, by a lot.

That gap between what I assumed and what the numbers actually say is the whole reason I’m writing this.

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• The number nobody budgets for

• Why this isn’t really a “them” problem

• Angela’s Observation

• The habit that actually moves the needle

• Spreading it out, not just spreading it thin

• What’s Next

• Where most people actually get stuck

• Angela’s Observation

• The uncertain backdrop, and why it doesn’t change the answer

• Angela’s Take

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The number nobody budgets for

Here’s the figure that stopped me mid-scroll. A 65-year-old today can expect, on average, around 20 more years of life. By 2065, that stretches to roughly 24. That’s not a distant, someone-else’s-problem statistic, it’s the actual planning horizon for anyone retiring around now or in the next decade or two.

Twenty to twenty-five years is not a short runway. That’s longer than some people’s entire working careers. And it means the old shorthand, work for a few decades, save, retire around 63 or 64, lean on savings plus family, is starting to strain at the seams. Singapore’s own retirement age recently moved from 63 to 64, which is itself a quiet acknowledgment that the old math was already stretched thin.

The family-support piece is thinning too, and not just anecdotally. Across Southeast Asia, the share of the population aged over 60 is expected to nearly double by 2050. When more people are retired and fewer are working, the traditional idea of children supporting ageing parents gets harder to lean on as a plan, not because families stop caring, but because the arithmetic of who’s earning and who’s drawing down simply shifts.

Why this isn’t really a “them” problem

I want to be honest about something. When I first read through the research behind this, my instinct was to file it under global trends, interesting, but abstract. Then I actually mapped it against my own household, and it stopped feeling abstract fast.

My husband and I are both past the point where “start early” is advice we can still act on in full. We’re squarely in the stretch where the real question isn’t whether to start, it’s whether what’s already running is actually built to last as long as we might need it to.

That’s the uncomfortable part of a 20-to-25-year runway. It’s not really a savings target. It’s an income-generation problem, spread over a period longer than most people plan around. And the earlier someone actually confronts that shift in framing, from “how much do I save” to “how do I make this last, and keep growing, for two and a half decades,” the more room they have to actually do something about it.

🟠 Angela’s Observation

What struck me most wasn’t the twenty-year figure itself, it was how ordinary that number sounded when I first read it, and how heavy it felt once I actually sat with it. Twenty years is roughly the length of raising a child from birth to adulthood. Most of us can picture that stretch of time clearly, the milestones, the changes, the sheer amount of living that happens in it.

Now flip that same span around and picture funding it, without a salary coming in, while everything from healthcare costs to your own energy levels shift along the way. I don’t think the problem is that people don’t know retirement lasts a long time.

I think the problem is that we picture it as a single flat number on a spreadsheet instead of an actual, lived, two-decade stretch of life. That reframing alone changed how I look at my own numbers.

The habit that actually moves the needle

So what do you actually do with a runway that long? The honest answer, based on everything I read and the people I spoke to about it, isn’t a clever product or a perfectly timed entry point. It’s something far less exciting: consistency.

There’s a specific piece of behavioural thinking here worth sitting with. People tend to wait for the “right moment” to start investing, and that waiting is often the single biggest cost. Whether it’s twenty dollars, a hundred, or a thousand a month, the argument for investing it the moment it lands, rather than waiting for a better-looking entry point, comes down to a fairly simple idea: money sitting idle in cash isn’t working toward that twenty-year runway at all, it’s just waiting.

There’s also a quieter, more structural point buried in how auto-enrolment retirement schemes work in places like Australia and the UK. Those systems automatically put people’s contributions into diversified portfolios unless they actively opt out, and the logic behind that design is almost the opposite of what you’d expect. Inertia, normally the thing that stops people from acting, becomes the thing that keeps them saving, because the default is “on,” not “off.” If that sounds familiar, it should.

It’s the same logic behind CPF, and behind any automated, recurring investment plan you set up once and then leave alone. You’re not relying on willpower every single month. You’re relying on a system that already assumes you’ll keep going.

Spreading it out, not just spreading it thin

There’s one more idea from this research worth flagging, because I think it gets missed. Diversification usually gets talked about as “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” different stocks, different sectors, different asset classes. But there’s a second kind that matters just as much: diversifying when you put money in, not just what you put it into.

If you’ve got a lump sum to invest, rather than putting all of it in on a single day, spreading it across a year, two years, even three, reduces the odds that a single bad-timing decision derails the whole plan. That’s not a market-timing strategy. It’s closer to the opposite, it’s an admission that nobody can reliably predict the best entry point, so the more useful move is removing the need to guess entirely.

And the risk you can afford to take with that money isn’t fixed either, it shifts with where you are. Earlier in a career, your future earning power is itself a kind of asset, which gives more room to ride out volatility. Closer to the point where you’re actually drawing the money down, a bad year matters more, because there’s less runway left to recover from it. The portfolio that made sense at 35 isn’t automatically the one that still makes sense at 58, and revisiting that isn’t a sign something went wrong, it’s just what a twenty-plus year plan is supposed to do along the way.

🔒 What’s Next

The systematic habit matters, but so does what you’re actually systematic about, and that’s where a lot of people quietly get stuck.

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Where most people actually get stuck

Knowing all of this and actually doing it are two very different things, and I don’t think that gap gets talked about honestly enough.

More than half of people surveyed on this topic said they want some form of support building their retirement portfolio, whether that’s a human adviser or a tool that removes the burden of constant decision-making. That’s not laziness. Retirement planning today isn’t just “save X amount.” It’s how much to save, how much risk to carry at each life stage, and eventually, how to actually draw an income out of what you’ve built, three genuinely different problems layered on top of each other.

I think that’s the real reason so many of us default to leaving money sitting in cash rather than actually deploying it. Not because we don’t understand compounding, most of us do, in theory. It’s that turning “I should invest more consistently” into an actual recurring habit is harder than it sounds, especially once you’re managing CPF, SRS, and personal savings all at once, each with its own rules and its own mental bucket.

If there’s one genuinely useful starting question buried in all of this, it’s a boring one: how much of your long-term retirement money is sitting in cash right now, doing nothing, simply because setting up something recurring felt like a task for another day? For a lot of people, myself included at points, the honest answer is more than they’d like to admit.

🟠 Angela’s Observation

I’ll admit something here. For a long time, my own approach to “investing consistently” was really just good intentions with no actual system behind it. I’d top up when I remembered, skip a few months when life got busy, and tell myself I’d catch up later. It wasn’t until I actually looked at what “later” had cost me, in missed months, not missed market timing, that I understood the auto-enrolment logic on a personal level. The system doesn’t need to be clever. It just needs to not depend on me remembering. That’s a small, almost embarrassing realisation, but I think it’s the one that actually changes behaviour, more than any amount of knowing the twenty-year number ever did.

The uncertain backdrop, and why it doesn’t change the answer

It would be dishonest to talk about a twenty-five-year retirement runway without acknowledging that the world it needs to be funded in isn’t especially calm right now. Government debt levels globally are elevated, inflation pressures haven’t fully settled, and the geopolitical backdrop shifts more often than most retirement plans are built to easily absorb.

None of that is a reason to wait. If anything, it’s the opposite. A portfolio that only holds up when conditions are calm was never actually diversified in the first place, it was just untested. The more useful question isn’t how many different assets you’re holding, it’s whether your mix can genuinely withstand a range of different environments, not just the one you happen to be in today.

And on the “should I wait for a calmer moment to start” instinct specifically, the research is fairly blunt about it: time spent invested tends to matter more than the precise timing of when you got in. Trying to exit before the bad news and re-enter after it almost never works as cleanly in practice as it sounds like it should in theory.

Angela’s Take

Here’s what I keep coming back to, writing all this out. None of the four ideas here are new or clever. Start early, be consistent, spread things out, and let your mix evolve as your life does. If anything, they’re almost disappointingly simple, which might be exactly why they’re so easy to put off.

What changed for me isn’t the advice itself, it’s the twenty-to-twenty-five-year number sitting underneath it. That’s not a distant retirement someday, that’s a real, fundable, decades-long stretch of actual life. I don’t have a tidy verdict to hand you here, this isn’t that kind of piece. But I’d rather sit with an uncomfortable number now than discover it the hard way at 75.

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Iggy’s Forensic Disclaimer

This video is a paid partnership with Longbridge Singapore. It is intended for general awareness and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or otherwise engage with any investment products or financial services. The presenter is not a licensed financial adviser and is not offering financial advice. All views expressed are solely those of the presenter and do not necessarily reflect the views of Longbridge Singapore. All investments carry risks, may not be suitable for everyone, and you may lose your investment principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. You should seek independent financial advice if you are unsure about any investment decisions. This advertisement has not been reviewed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

This content is produced for educational and informational purposes only. I am not a financial advisor — I am a retail investor who applies forensic analysis to my own portfolio and shares that process publicly. Nothing here constitutes a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, and no specific target prices or personalised financial advice are offered. Stocks assessed under Iggy’s Forensic Yield Standard are benchmarked against a 4.7% minimum yield hurdle; stocks flagged as Growth Watch fall below this threshold but demonstrate clean balance sheet metrics and an identifiable growth catalyst — these carry a materially different risk profile and are not suitable as yield replacements for income-dependent investors. All data is sourced from public filings and verified sources; where data is unverified it is explicitly flagged. All investments carry risk, including the potential loss of principal, and past performance is not indicative of future results. If you are making investment decisions involving CPF, SRS, or personal capital, please conduct your own due diligence or consult a MAS-licensed financial adviser before committing funds.