Cass Avery: Savings message that breaks the bank

The generation gap cuts both ways. As inexplicable as youth is to those who have crossed over into middle age, I can assure you that the years of maturity are a quiet Bermuda triangle to everyone chronologically south of those co-ordinates.

So listening to Dr Cullen beg us to start saving for our retirement is like being shouted at by someone trying to make themselves understood in a foreign language. Message received but not understood.

It takes a leap of human development to get beyond the 3-year-old stage of having to eat the chocolate immediately. At 3 it is inconceivable to delay gratification even by a few minutes. At 30 it is inconceivable not to wait a few decades.

Retirement savings just doesn't compute. We 20- and 30-somethings are counting on the possibility that by the time we need propping up, stem cells will provide us with a sprightly set of new legs and retirement funding will be equally well supported. I know this isn't what Dr Cullen wants us to think, but it's the truth.

Evidently he's worried by the latest survey showing about 57 per cent of people surveyed were saving for their retirement.

Well, I'm mightily impressed that the figure was that high. I think 57 per cent is amazing considering how many other things are vying for the attention of our wallets and considering the life yet to be lived between now and then.

I won't be ready to retire till some time in the 2030s or 40s and I'll be among a population boom opting out of the workforce en masse.

By then almost half the New Zealand population will be older than 45, with 1 million of us entering retirement. By then for every 100 people working there will be 40 of us wanting a superannuation payout. Hence the wobbly knees of Dr Cullen.

But before any cash can get to the bank to start a retirement pool (and I can start getting taxed on those savings - don't worry, Michael, we haven't missed the connection between our retirement pot and your coffers), life has yet to begin. There are homes to buy and families to start.

In the 2001 census, only 1 million people reported earning more than $25,000 a year gross income, and half of those earned less than $40,000. So after tax we've got most of the population taking home $30,000 or less. Where, oh where, Dr Cullen are the retirement savings coming from?

In Auckland house prices are on an exponential rise - 13 per cent more expensive this year than last. If you borrow $180,000 to get your first home, and for that you're only going to pick up an ex-rental 30 minutes' drive out of the city, even that, on a 25-year mortgage at the current rate of about 7 per cent is going to cost $381,660 by the time it's paid off.

And now Auckland rates are about to take a 9 per cent hike after rising 8.5 per cent last year, all within the term of a porkie-pies council who promised to freeze rates.

Then there are kids. It costs half a million dollars to raise two kids from birth to 20, according to research published in the Herald. At a take-home pay of $30,000 a year, doubled if the family has two earners at home, that's a long financial road.

Even things like Christmas cost so much more than they used to. If it's the thought that counts, you'd better be thinking about something expensive, because in the past 50 years Christmas has gone from a wartime orange to a turn-of-the-century average spend of nearly $1000 a family.

The holiday at the beach ... well, if you're in Auckland and you want to drive less than three hours and holiday anywhere on the east coast, it'll be $1200 a week easily for beach front. Who could have predicted that fibrolite would ever appreciate like that?

Technology is eating up the finances, too. I remember when my family replaced our dial phone with a push-button model. It was like moving from Auckland to LA. That first button phone lasted us more than a decade. Now? Well, I've replaced my mobile phone three times in the past five years.

Getting from our 20s or 30s to our mid-60s will break the bank. Retirement savings is an extraordinary gesture of financial valour on top of everything else.

I think 57 per cent ain't bad, Dr Cullen, and unless we all get a 20 per cent pay increase like John Banks, the porkie-pie mayor, I don't think too many of us will be able to put retirement on our financial calendar for 2003.

Retirement is just so far away and all I think about when I think of being 65 is that Zimmer frames will have been replaced by rejuvenated body parts, I will be able to trim my toenails electronically, and punk rock surely, surely will have died.