A newspaper headline this week captured something many people already feel in their bones:
Only 9% of the working population are on course for a comfortable retirement.
Another headline put the figure even more starkly:
The £1.2m cost of a comfortable retirement in Britain today.
The story is familiar. People are living longer. The cost of living has risen. Housing costs remain heavy. Pension saving is inadequate. Auto-enrolment contributions are too low. More older people are returning to work because retirement, as traditionally imagined, no longer adds up.
The press has even coined a phrase for it: the unretiree.
These are people who thought they had reached the point of stopping work, only to find that the numbers no longer support the life they expected. Some return to employment. Some freelance. Some tutor. Some monetise a skill. Some cut spending. Some simply keep going because they do not feel they have a real choice.
But beneath the financial story sits a deeper planning failure.
We have spent decades teaching people to plan retirement as a money event.
It is not.
Retirement is a life transition.
And when we reduce it to a pension pot, we leave people exposed.
The pension pot was never the whole plan
The article refers to figures suggesting that a comfortable retirement may require an annual income of around £44,000 for a single person, with a pension pot potentially in the region of £1m or more depending on assumptions.
For many households, those numbers are not motivating. They are paralysing.
They can make people feel that retirement planning is something only the wealthy can do properly. Everyone else is left with anxiety, vague hope, or resignation.
That is one of the reasons the Academy of Life Planning argues for a different starting point.
The question should not begin with:
“How big does my pension pot need to be?”
It should begin with:
“What kind of life am I trying to sustain, and what assets do I already have?”
Those assets are not only financial.
They include health, skills, relationships, knowledge, home, community, adaptability, creativity, reputation, and purpose. In AoLP language, this is Total Wealth: the full set of resources that support a person’s ability to live well.
Money matters. Of course it does.
But money is not the only source of later-life security.
The rise of the “unretiree” is a warning sign
The story about older people returning to work is often framed as a problem of insufficient pension savings.
That is partly true.
But it is also evidence that human capital — a person’s capacity to earn, contribute, adapt, learn, and create value — remains central much later in life than traditional retirement models assume.
For some people, returning to work may be positive. It can bring structure, purpose, social contact, and additional income. A person who chooses meaningful work in later life may feel more alive, not less.
But for others, “unretirement” is not freedom. It is necessity.
That distinction matters.
There is a world of difference between:
“I still have something to give.”
and
“I cannot afford to stop.”
Good planning should help people move toward the first and avoid being trapped in the second.
Auto-enrolment alone cannot solve a whole-life problem
The policy response will probably focus on increasing minimum pension contributions. That may be necessary. Current auto-enrolment levels are unlikely to deliver comfortable retirement outcomes for many people.
But contribution rates alone will not solve the deeper issue.
A higher pension contribution helps only if people can afford it, understand it, trust the system, and remain sufficiently stable throughout working life to benefit from it.
Many cannot.
People experience divorce, caring responsibilities, illness, redundancy, business failure, bereavement, financial exploitation, unstable housing, and career disruption. Women, in particular, often face pension gaps because of career breaks, part-time work, caring roles, and lower lifetime earnings.
A pension system built around uninterrupted full-time employment will always fail those whose lives do not fit that pattern.
So the answer cannot simply be “save more”.
For many people, the more honest answer is:
“Plan more widely.”
Retirement planning must become agency planning
At AoLP, we increasingly see the planning challenge as one of restored human agency.
Agency means the ability to understand your situation, see your options, make informed choices, and act in line with your values.
Traditional retirement planning often removes agency by making people dependent on projections, products, advisers, and assumptions they do not fully understand.
A more human approach restores agency by helping people answer clearer questions:
What life am I trying to protect?
What does “enough” look like for me?
What skills, strengths, and relationships can support me?
What risks could destabilise me?
What choices do I still have?
What small action would improve my position now?
This does not replace financial planning. It makes financial planning more grounded.
The pension pot becomes one part of the plan, not the whole plan.
The £1.2m headline may be technically useful but emotionally dangerous
Big numbers attract attention. They also create fear.
A headline saying a comfortable retirement costs £1.2m may be based on reasonable assumptions, but it can also reinforce a sense of helplessness.
Many people will never accumulate that level of financial capital.
If the message they hear is, “You have failed unless you reach this number,” they may disengage entirely.
That would be the worst possible outcome.
A better message is this:
You may not be able to control every economic condition, but you can still improve your position by understanding your total wealth, strengthening your human capital, reducing avoidable leakage, clarifying your priorities, and making better decisions earlier.
That is a more empowering starting point.
It does not deny the financial reality.
It gives people a way back into the conversation.
The future planner must help people develop the whole person
This is where the role of the Total Wealth Planner becomes important.
A Total Wealth Planner is not simply someone who calculates a pension shortfall. Nor are they there to sell a product to close the gap.
Their role is to help people restore clarity, structure, confidence, and agency across the whole of life.
That might include:
Understanding spending and lifestyle needs.
Mapping pension, State Pension, property, work, and other income sources.
Exploring later-life work by choice, not desperation.
Identifying skills that can create income or meaning.
Planning for health, care, family, home, purpose, and contribution.
Helping people use AI and simple tools to think more clearly before they need formal advice.
The planner of the future must be less product-distributor and more agency-restoration facilitator.
The aim is not to make people dependent on expertise forever.
The aim is to help them become more capable, more informed, and more self-directed.
“Enough” is not only a number
The retirement industry often talks as though everyone is aiming for the same destination: more money, more consumption, more comfort.
But many people are not looking for luxury.
They are looking for peace.
They want enough to live with dignity. Enough to stay warm. Enough to help their family. Enough to maintain health. Enough to make choices. Enough not to be frightened every time a bill arrives.
For some, enough will include travel and leisure.
For others, enough may mean a modest home, meaningful work, trusted relationships, and a sense of usefulness.
This is why later-life planning must not be reduced to one benchmark income figure.
Benchmarks can help.
But they should not define the person.
The real lesson
The story of the “unretiree” is not just a story about pension inadequacy.
It is a story about a society that has over-financialised later life while under-developing human capability.
It is a story about people being told to save into systems they do not fully understand, then discovering too late that the promise was thinner than they thought.
It is a story about why planning life before planning money matters.
And it is a story about why the next evolution of financial planning must be built around total wealth, human agency, and whole-person development.
Because the uncomfortable truth is this:
A pension pot alone cannot carry the full weight of a human life.
The better question is not simply, “How much money do I need to retire?”
It is:
“What would help me live well, stay capable, remain connected, and make choices for as long as possible?”
That is where real planning begins.
Academy of Life Planning 