Retirement: To Be or Not To Be?

Interesting food for thought in this article (Point No. 5) about how our generation’s retirement will be vastly different from our parents’ or grandparents’. If we plan to retire at or around 65, we should expect 25-30 more years ahead of us with little to no income. I’m not counting on Social Security to be solvent by that time, so that would mean our retirement savings would have to fund all those extra years. In order for that to happen, we would have to save up a huge amount of money, probably $4+ million in today’s dollars. That raises the question, should we really be saving as much as possible (currently around 15% of our income) right now for our retirement? Or should we focus on living our lives with a little more spending now, and plan to continue working as long as possible? My first instinct is that we should do both: first, save as much as possible over the next two years, then, while that is (hopefully) growing, relax on the saving to allow for more traveling, etc. Both of us highly resist the idea of “waiting” until retirement to chase our dreams, and the idea of having a little more money freed up now sounds great. But is it a sound financial decision?