Don’t Kick The Can Down The Road

I’ll be honest — I’m a little worried.

A few months ago, in a moment of weakness, I agreed to run a 10k road race. That’s 6.25 miles, for those of you who’ve never had cause to think in kilometres. The problem? Although I’m retired and theoretically swimming in free time, I’ve somehow managed to be too busy to train properly. I’ve done a few 5k fun runs, my comfort zone distance, and told myself that was close enough. Now, with only weeks to go, I’m hoping on a prayer that my legs remember what they signed up for. In short, I’ve kicked the training can down the road.

A road race is low stakes. The worst that awaits me is sore muscles, a slightly embarrassing finish time, and what my wife Suzie generously calls my “penguin walk” for a day or two. But this very human habit of putting off until tomorrow what we could do today becomes genuinely dangerous when people apply the same mindset to their financial lives.

Retirement planning works exactly like race training. Start early, build consistently, and the goal feels manageable. Leave it too late and you’re cramming, except the consequences aren’t sore legs. They’re working longer than you wanted, cutting your standard of living, or depending on others when you’d rather be independent.

The math is straightforward. Money invested in your 30s does far more heavy lifting than the same amount invested in your 50s. A 30-year-old contributing $300 a month could retire with substantially more than a 45-year-old contributing $700, simply because time is the engine doing most of the work. Whoever called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world wasn’t wrong.

And yet people delay. Because retirement feels abstract when it’s decades away. Because there’s always a more pressing priority: the car, the kitchen, the kids’ college fund. Because starting feels complicated, and inertia is comfortable. We’re all, in our own way, doing the occasional fun run and calling it preparation.

This plays out in predictable ways. People tell themselves they’ll start saving when they earn more, which turns out to be the most expensive version of delay — your 20s and early 30s are your most valuable years, and you can’t buy them back. Others assume having a 401(k) at work means they’re covered, without checking whether they’re contributing enough to capture the full employer match. That match is the closest thing to a guaranteed return you’ll ever find, and leaving it on the table is one of the costliest mistakes in personal finance. Then there’s the classic “I’ll get serious next year,” which tends to arrive about a decade later than planned.

I’ll probably finish my 10k. It’ll be uncomfortable, and I’ll have earned every ache. But the race has a fixed date and there are no extensions.

Retirement planning doesn’t work that way. The penalties for delay are slow and invisible — until suddenly they aren’t. Social Security provides a foundation, but it was never designed to be the whole house. The rest is on you, and the earlier you start building, the more comfortable that house is going to be.

The best time to start was yesterday. The second best time is right now. Don’t kick the can. Future you is watching, and they really do promise to train for that 10k…starting first thing tomorrow.