Adulthood is challenging.

Sure there are moments of pure joy and excitement, excluding paying taxes and overwhelming responsibility.

Playing the part of a parent, we start saving for the future the minute a baby is born.

Congratulations! It’s a girl.

She weighs eight pounds, has ten perfect fingers, and apparently needs a 529 plan immediately because one day she will go to college, and judging by tuition trends, four years at a decent university will cost approximately the same as a small Caribbean island.

So we save.

Then we save for the first house. The emergency fund. The next house. Insurance coverage. Finally, the big one…retirement, except retirement has changed.

Once upon a time, you retired at 65, bought a cardigan, played golf, took a cruise and hoped the money lasted.

Now we are living into our 80s, 90s and increasingly beyond. We have better medicine, better knees, better teeth and enough supplements in the kitchen cabinet to open a small pharmacy which is terrific, except nobody seems to have explained this to our retirement accounts.

No one realized we would also elect a dictator who has increased the cost of living in America exponentially.

We have spent decades being told to save enough to retire. Nobody mentioned we might have to finance 30 years of not working.

That’s not retirement.

That is a second adulthood without a paycheck.

It raises a question I find myself thinking about more often.

Exactly how much are we supposed to save for a future we cannot predict?

There are two potentially unhappy people involved here.

There is 95-year-old me, who would very much appreciate having enough money.

And there is present-day me, who would very much like to travel and not sit at home waiting for the Golden Years to crush me.

Financial planners naturally worry about the first person.

I am increasingly sympathetic to the second.

Obviously, we need to save. Running out of money in your 90s is considerably less charming than it sounds.

There is another danger we rarely discuss. Running out of healthy years while sitting on a perfectly respectable investment portfolio.

Maybe the goal isn’t simply to die with enough money.

Maybe it is to arrive at the end having used the money intelligently. A generous allotment for security, some for the people we love, and some for actually living while our knees, backs and digestive systems are still willing to participate.

Save for tomorrow.

Absolutely.

Just remember that today was once the tomorrow you were saving for.