OK, that may be a little on the confident side, but I am armed with the official statistics from…the Office for National Statistics. Oh yes, the nights fly by in the Garside household.

If you want to join in the excitement, here they are.  My blog stats will show how many people click on this link – my bet is very few!  I’ll tell you what, I will give you a bit of detail now and you could come back to the link afterwards.

So, there is a list of life expectancies for kids born now and 18 year olds now. Further down the page is the life expectancy for people aged 65 now, and this is the interesting bit for me.

So, if you are a chap turning 65 now, you have  decent chance of living another 18 – 20 years… Girls, will last about 3 years longer than chaps.

If  I had been writing this blog in 1950, I’d have been saying 65 year old boys will last another 12 years, girls 14.4 years.

So, on average we’re living longer and that’s nice.

And, it’s the reason planning for an income in retirement is so important.

There are lots of ways of planning for an income in retirement – notice please that I don’t say ‘paying into a pension’.

Retirement for people of my age will have to be planned differently, just paying into a pension won’t cut the mustard any more, the advice needs to be much more holistic and will include 2 things – paying for life as you live it, and a plan for if you end up requiring long term care.

The income side of things may include:

Old age pension,Second state pension, pension tax credits, heating allowance, free TV licences and bus travel, but also making a bit of cash from your hobbies, taking in a lodger, being a helpful man at B & Q, ebay/Carboot trading, self sufficiency ideas like keeping chickens or bees, shrewd use of your savings, actively reducing your bills etc.

And, it will include pension planning, but planning your whole retirement based on a pension now will be too big an ask, it has to be a more imaginative approach these days.

It will be different for people retiring in the future than it is now, but different doesn’t necessarily mean bad.

The long term care thing may be trickier, but since only 1 in 5 go into long term care, it needs a less ‘urgent’ plan, paying a monthly payment is often not worth the struggle, but it’s worth knowing the costs and knowing the various mechanisms for paying for those costs.

What you need is an imaginative Financial Adviser who knows all this stuff…

Oh, and if you want, now go back and click on that link