CALGARY – As the millennial generation gets closer to midlife and starts to make retirement plans, financial experts are warning that not only will they have to save twice as much money as their parents, they will also have to save one more planet.
“We used to recommend that workers put away ten percent of their earnings for retirement, but we are now recommending that workers put away the fossil fuel CEOs who have been knowingly destroying the ecosystem for decades and continue to use their wealth and influence to block meaningful environmental action,” said financial planner John Hill.
“The focus of retirement advising has shifted from telling people they need to save for the future to telling them they need to save the future.”
Millennials hoping to experience the same stability in later life as the baby boomer generation are being urged to cut down on frivolous driving, to eat less meat, and to somehow remove 1000 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere.
“When I went in for retirement planning I thought they were going to advise me to buy a house and put my money into mutual funds,” said millennial Jane Henry. “But instead they really hammered home that I need stop the permafrost from melting.”
“When I told them I hoped to spend my retirement traveling, maybe take up snorkeling, they laughed for a long time before described the worldwide political unrest that will result if we don’t avoid the major tipping points that lead to hothouse Earth,” Henry said. “Then they told me to get used to looking at, and eating, jellyfish, because they’re the only things that will survive in the warm, mostly dead oceans of my golden years.”
“I guess in the back of mind I knew that I wasn’t saving enough for retirement, but I was mostly thinking in terms of money when I should have also been thinking in terms of rain-forests.”
While they usually encourage people to start planning for retirement as soon as possible, most financial planners are forgoing giving Generation Z any retirement advice at all because it’s just too depressing.
