Don’t Rob The Person You Are Becoming
Peter McGahan
Monday 6th July, 2026.
BEHAVIOURAL research describes future self‑continuity as the degree to which you feel that “me at 70” is the same person as “me today”.
When that link is weak, the brain treats the future self as being more like a stranger than the same person moved forward in time, which makes giving money to that future self feels like a loss rather than neutral.
In saving terms, this shows up as present bias and procrastination: people know they “should” save into pensions or ISAs, but short‑term spending wins because it benefits the present self they care about.
No wonder we put it off. Today’s self has bills, holidays, cars, children, Amazon, takeaways, leaking gutters and the occasional emotional support biscuit. Future self sits quietly in the corner with a state pension forecast and a look of mild disappointment.
Nest Insight put the problem plainly: the future self can feel like a different person, and although people say they want to save for retirement, “their future self never quite gets around to it”. It also notes that automatic enrolment into pensions in work has helped, precisely because it saves people from having to make the active decision to start.
Hal Hershfield and others showed that when people saw age-progressed versions of themselves, they were more willing to allocate money towards retirement than people shown strangers or current images - make the older you vivid enough and your choices today change.
The UK evidence shows why these matter. The FCA’s Financial Lives 2024 survey found that even among people aged 45 and over with defined contribution pensions, only 25 per cent had a clear plan for accessing their pension funds. Fewer than half had a good idea of the annual income they expected from their DC pension, and just 30 per cent had given a great deal of thought to how their outgoings may change in retirement.
At the same time, only nine per cent of adults received financial advice about pensions or investments in the previous 12 months. The FCA also said around seven million UK adults hold £10,000 or more in cash savings and may be missing out on the benefits of investing through life; among those not advised and holding that level of cash, 24 per cent said they did not invest because they did not know
enough, 12 per cent felt overwhelmed by the options, and eight per cent said they needed more support.
This is future-self disconnection in practice. Cash feels safe because today’s self can see it. Investing feels uncertain because the reward belongs to someone older, greyer and currently unable to complain. MoneyHelper is clear that cash has its place for short-term needs, but for money set aside for five years or more, investing may be more appropriate; cash savings are generally not the best long-term home because inflation can erode buying power.
Pensions show the same tug-of-war. DWP figures show that 89 per cent of eligible employees in Great Britain were saving into a workplace pension in 2024, with opt-outs among newly started savers around eight to 10 per cent and stopping-saving rates under one per cent per quarter. Auto-enrolment works because it protects the future self from the present self’s ability to say, “not this month”.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that around 30 to 40 per cent of private sector employees saving into defined contribution pensions (roughly 5 to 7million people), are on course for individual retirement incomes below standard benchmarks. The issue is not simply that people have no pension. It is that many are not paying in enough, early enough, or consciously enough.
The present self just must stop treating the pension contribution as theft.
Good financial planning makes the future self, real. Not vague retirement. Not “later”. A real person, in a real home, with real heating bills, real food costs, real medical needs, real holidays, and a real desire not to ask the children for money!
The question is not whether you care about your future. Most people do. The question is whether you care about it early enough to make today slightly less comfortable, so tomorrow is not unnecessarily hard. Every pound saved is a small act of loyalty to the person you are still becoming. You are not handing money to someone else. You are keeping faith with yourself.
I will be creating a guide to investing, so, if you would like a complimentary copy, please email info@wwfp.net.
Peter McGahan is the Chief Executive Officer of Independent Financial Adviser firm, Worldwide Financial Planning. Worldwide Financial Planning is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
