Most people understand the importance of planning financially for retirement. Governments, employers and the pensions industry have spent decades building systems, incentives and behavioural nudges to encourage long-term saving. The message is consistent: start early, contribute regularly and let compounding work in your favour.
Yet financial retirement planning is only half complete without planning for future wellbeing. Financial planning may determine whether we can afford retirement, but health determines whether we are physically and cognitively capable of enjoying it.
In reality, financial and wellbeing planning are two sides of the same retirement moon. In many ways, wellbeing planning may be even more important. Inadequate savings can be supplemented by working longer or part-time, but poor health removes flexibility. In fact, it can force early retirement and create additional costs, especially if care is needed. And it affects not only the individual, but the wider family. In later life, poor health can become one of the greatest financial and emotional risks a family faces.
This means the same disciplines that have been successfully applied to pensions should be extended to wellbeing. Wellbeing now needs to see the sun and no longer remain on the dark side of the moon.
The Size of the Problem
The UK has a healthy life expectancy (HLE) problem. According to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data for 2022–2024, healthy life expectancy from birth is 60.7 years for males and 60.9 years for females, compared to overall life expectancy of 79.1 years and 83.0 years, respectively. HLE is now the lowest since the data series began in 2011.
The deprivation gap is also severe and widening. A male in the least deprived category can expect a healthy life expectancy of 69.2 years, compared to just 49.8 years in the most deprived category.
This means the people who may struggle most to save for retirement — and who need the greatest flexibility to work later in life — are also the most likely to spend a greater proportion of later life living with chronic illness, disability or reduced independence.
Good health preserves employability, independence and financial resilience.
Lifestyle is the best forward indicator of chronic disease
The UK’s poor healthy life expectancy is not simply a medical problem. It is the long-term consequence of lifestyle patterns that have largely gone unmeasured, unmanaged and uncorrected for decades. Lifestyle choices repeated over many years, whether consciously or through inertia, are among the strongest predictors of future health.
The UK’s poor healthy life expectancy is closely linked to modern lifestyle patterns. Too many are increasingly sedentary, physically inactive, sleep deprived, chronically stressed and overweight. These behaviours are not the result of deliberate choices, but inertia reinforced by modern working and living environments.
These behaviours may appear insignificant day-to-day, but compounded over 30 years, they substantially increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, dementia and musculoskeletal decline. Estimates suggest lifestyle factors account for around 70% of chronic disease risk.
The problem is that, unlike pensions, most people never formally ‘plan’ their future health, even though wellbeing should increasingly be viewed as a form of long-term asset protection. This is the dark side of the moon.
Applying pension disciplines to wellbeing
For wellbeing to move from the dark side of the retirement moon, the same sunlight used for pension savings should apply to lifestyle and prevention. This means:
- Effective tools to quantify disease risk from lifestyle
- Workplace solutions where employers participate
- Auto-enrolment to address behavioural inertia
- Education, recognising this is necessary but insufficient
Effective tools to quantify disease risk from lifestyle
What is not measured cannot be changed. We already have a wide range of effective pension planning tools, but no meaningful tools to measure lifestyle or quantify the impact of small lifestyle improvements. Yet lifestyle is one of the strongest forward indicators of chronic disease.
People need help to understand the long-term health implications of their current behaviours and the potential gains from small, sustainable positive lifestyle changes.
A workplace solution where employers participate
We can learn from Japan and Singapore, countries with the world’s longest healthy life expectancies. In Japan, employers are legally required to provide annual employee health checks and follow-up interventions. In Singapore, while voluntary, workplace health and prevention are deeply embedded in the culture.
For employers, effective wellbeing solutions can reduce absenteeism, improve productivity and lower healthcare and insurance costs.
Auto-enrolment to address behavioural inertia
Employers could provide employees with a “health wallet” and make monthly contributions that can only be unlocked when employees complete specific wellbeing actions, such as measuring lifestyle risk, tracking activities or participating in group challenges.
Singapore has demonstrated that even modest financial rewards can motivate behaviour and reinforce healthier habits over time.
Education, recognising this is necessary but insufficient.
Pension education alone was not enough to change behaviour. Behavioural systems are also required. However, education provides an important foundation to explain and support other actions.
Governments, employers and insurers could do far more to make long-term wellbeing planning a key part of retirement planning.
In Summary
The UK has rightly invested enormous effort into improving pension participation. Successive governments have provided tax incentives, statutory minimum contributions, behavioural nudges and regulations to encourage long-term saving. There is also a thriving private industry of employers and investment companies competing to promote retirement savings. This is the bright side of the moon.
But retirement without health has equally serious consequences — limiting flexibility to work longer, increasing living costs and reducing the ability to enjoy later-life opportunities. Yet healthy life expectancy in the UK is woefully poor and continues to deteriorate, especially amongst the most deprived. This is the dark side of the moon, which now needs to see the light, with the same principles that underpin pension saving.
The pensions industry is well placed to make a significant wellbeing difference with a workplace solution to start engagement early, effective lifestyle digital tools and auto-enrolment in a “health wallet”, all underpinned with a joined-up education plan.
