Same Money, Different Story

Retirement takes up a lot of space in our collective consciousness. It’s what we’re all supposedly saving for, and it’s especially loaded right now, when so many people struggle to get by while working full-time.

How are we supposed to save for retirement when we can barely manage the present? Maybe we should all give up. Who needs savings anyway?

That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if I’ve ever heard one.

Interestingly, plenty of people keep saving anyway. What story are they telling themselves? Maybe they’ve noticed how many impoverished, vulnerable seniors are already out there, and that’s motivation enough. Maybe they still have hope for how things will go. Maybe they’re just hedging their bets.

Whatever story you’re telling yourself about saving right now is quietly shaping how you actually live and spend.

I first noticed how much these stories matter through my volunteer work with the Community Volunteer Income Tax Program. In one year alone, I helped file forty-four returns for low-income seniors, and the highest earner among them made $28,000. During tax season, the line at the Seniors’ Centre wraps around the block. The cutoff to qualify for free filing is earning under thirty thousand dollars a year, and even that’s generous relative to what most people in that line actually bring in. Between Old Age Security and a maxed-out CPP contribution history, someone with no other savings tops out around twenty-five thousand dollars a year. That’s a lot of seniors living on very little, each carrying a different story about how they got there.

One woman I helped had lost her husband years earlier, and with him, the financial security she’d expected to carry her through old age. She’d never worked outside the home. What little she had left, she’d since lent to family, and that money hadn’t come back to her. Every time I saw her, that loss came up again, clearly still the loop playing in her head. And yet she was sharp, put-together, moved quickly for her age, lived somewhere lovely, and had grandchildren who visited. None of that seemed to register next to the story she was telling herself. I could see the worry sitting right on her face.

Another man I helped, in the same building, offered me tea while I worked through his return. We talked about music, hobbies, his dog, who he still tried to walk daily even though walking had gotten harder. He seemed genuinely upbeat.

Financially, there was no real difference between them. Same fixed, minimal means, same basic constraints. But they were living in two completely different stories.

We all find our own way of coping with whatever we’re handed. How we manage it, and the story we tell ourselves about it, shapes how the present actually feels, and how the future unfolds from there.

Most of us will eventually retire, and eventually stop being able to earn. It’s worth planning for. If you want to know where I personally land on it, I’m solidly in the hedging-my-bets camp. It’s a lot easier to stay hopeful when you feel like you have some actual control over your own situation.