Retirement Planning

Planning for my retirement has been getting more and more important to me the older I get. I've got a few things in place, but one of my primary retirement plans is to keep working as long as I can and not have to dip heavily into any savings until I absolutely have to.

I heard something interesting in Sunday School today. Jesus actually taught about retirement planning.

Luke 12:16-21. The parable of the rich fool:  "The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.' Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry."'  "But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?' This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."

How many of us would respond like this: It is irresponsible to not plan properly for the future - we will just be a burden on others if we don't make sure we take care of ourselves. True. But, God wants us to be taking care of the old, the sick, the orphans and the widows. Maybe he asks this of us because he would rather we all pay more attention to giving our money away now instead of piling it up in our new larger barns for our retirement. But if we don't take care of ourselves we will be just like the birds of the air or the lillies of the field! (Matthew 6:25-34) Yup, that's right.

Makes us kind of scared to think that way right? That's because we're not taking care of the old people in our lives like we should be. Neither are any of our friends or family. That's why we also think we're going to be screwed once we retire unless we save as much as possible for ourselves.

God is likely calling us to do other things with the majority of our money that we are salting away for ourselves.

...But:

We need enough to be able to spend time in our condo in Palm Springs after we retire right?

We need enough to be able to go on our annual winter cruise with our friends right?

We need enough to maintain our standard of living right?

We need enough to...

I mean, we've earned these things!