Taking Stock 28 May 2026

James Lee writes:

The times they are a-changin’.

Retirement has traditionally been viewed as something you think about later in life, a financial discussion reserved for your 50s or 60s, focused largely around pension, savings, investment returns, and deciding when to stop working.

Increasingly though, I think that definition is becoming outdated.

Retirement is changing, and in the modern world I would challenge people to think about it less as a destination at the end of your working life, and more as a lifelong journey reflecting how you actually want to live.

How do you want to spend your time? What kind of work gives you purpose? How important is flexibility?

What role do health, family, community, and financial independence play in your life?

And perhaps, most importantly, how do you build a life that remains sustainable as the world around you changes?

I spend my working life at the intersection of healthcare, artificial intelligence, and finance, three industries that in many ways are colliding.

The more time I spend across those worlds, the more I travel, read, and speak with people globally, the more convinced I become that many of the assumptions underpinning modern retirement are beginning to break down, not gradually but structurally.

This is not simply another economic cycle, another market downturn, or another political phase. The reality is that the financial responsibility for retirement is increasingly shifting from governments back to individuals. Whether people like it or not, that shift has already begun.

Healthcare and retirement are ultimately two sides of the same coin.

Most people are not actually afraid of retirement itself. They are afraid of dependency, illness, outliving their savings, or becoming financially vulnerable at the point in life where they have the least ability to recover.

For decades many of us built our expectations around relatively stable assumptions: governments would provide pensions, healthcare systems would continue to improve, and the state would support us later in life because we contributed taxes during our working years.

Increasingly though, many of the assumptions that shaped the past 30 years no longer appear guaranteed.

The next 30 years are likely to look fundamentally different from the last 30, in ways that will undoubtedly be exciting, innovative, and full of opportunity, but also uncertain and disruptive.

As we plan for retirement, we need to think not only about how much money we need, but also how we actually want to live, what support we can realistically expect, what responsibilities will increasingly fall back onto us individually, and what happens if the systems we assumed would always exist begin to strain.

To understand that, it helps to revisit where the modern idea of retirement actually came from.

Many of the systems we take for granted today trace their roots back to late 19th century Germany, under Otto von Bismarck.

Bismarck is often remembered as the architect of the modern welfare state, although his motivations were probably less about kindness and more about practicality and control. He believed national power would be determined by “iron and blood” - industrial capability, economic strength, and military power - rather than speeches or majority votes, but he also understood something equally important - social instability threatens the state itself.

To reduce unrest and strengthen loyalty to the nation, Germany introduced some of the first large-scale social insurance systems, sickness insurance, workplace accident insurance, and old age pensions.

These systems became the foundation for much of the modern world’s healthcare, workers’ compensation, and social security systems. The basic social contract was relatively simple. You worked, paid taxes during your productive years, and the state would help support you later in life.

Following the Great Depression, much of the Western world expanded versions of this model, including the United States and eventually New Zealand’s modern welfare systems, and for most of the 20th century retirement planning existed within that social contract.

The challenge today is that many of these systems were designed for a very different demographic and economic reality.

People are living longer, birth rates are falling, healthcare costs continue to rise, and governments around the world are carrying historically high debt burdens.

Today fewer than 10 percent of countries run meaningful budget surpluses. Most spend more than they collect in revenue each year, adding to already large debt balances. Global government debt has risen from roughly USD$60 trillion to more than USD$110 trillion in the past decade alone.

Three countries - the United States, China, and Japan - now account for 60 percent of global debt, 45 percent of global GDP, yet a significant amount of global economic growth. This is why the world watches those three countries so closely.

In the United States alone, interest payments on federal debt now consume roughly 20 cents of every federal tax dollar collected, but debt continues to increase, and inflation from the Iran war will push rates even higher. To give context to that, $9 trillion of US debt matures next year and will reprice from Covid’s very low rates to between 4.5 and 5 percent. Last week the US issued a 30-year bond at 5.04 percent, for example. Debt servicing costs are soaring and are likely to continue on this new trajectory unless governments run surpluses.

Sometime in the next five years US debt will exceed $45 trillion and debt servicing will exceed 30 cents of every dollar of tax collected.

These trends are not isolated. They are structural across much of the developed world, and governments are already responding through higher retirement ages, pressure on public healthcare systems, increasing reliance on private retirement savings, and a gradual shift in responsibility from the state back towards the individual.

The difficult truth is that many governments already know the current trajectory is financially unsustainable long term.

And that brings me to New Zealand.

Our Prime Minister knows that healthcare costs, demographic aging, and rising debt levels are not abstract future problems. They are mathematical realities. He knows the current trajectory is unsustainable with near 100 percent certainty, and while much of the pressure may fully emerge beyond his political tenure, leadership is ultimately measured by the willingness to confront difficult truths early, rather than simply to be inherited later.

The government has the intellect and the opportunity to: -

Create tax incentives for employment, and hammer companies cutting costs while AI washing.

Make government procurement standards so that you need 200 NZ-based employees to be eligible. Lead the world in preventative healthcare, and fusion.

This may sound pessimistic, but I do not think the future is entirely negative. History rarely moves in a straight line.

The same forces disrupting traditional retirement assumptions are also creating extraordinary opportunities.

Artificial intelligence is a perfect example.

AI is often discussed almost entirely as a threat to employment, but I increasingly think people misunderstand where its biggest impact may occur.

Over the past 50 years, working life for many people has quietly become unsustainable. Work has increasingly meant late nights, weekend emails, missed children’s sports games, constant connectivity, and a culture where many salaried workers are paid for 40 hours but often work significantly more.

AI may help rebalance some of that.

Today AI is already capable of saving workers meaningful amounts of time by summarising information, drafting documents, automating repetitive tasks, accelerating research, and helping organise increasingly complex workloads.

Importantly though, AI still lacks many of the things that make human work valuable. Judgment matters, context matters, creativity matters, relationships matter, and purpose matters. The human element still matters enormously.

I do not see AI replacing people nearly as much as I see it augmenting them, and if technology allows people to reclaim even part of their time - moving from a 60-hour working life back toward something closer to 40 hours - that may have profound implications for health, family, and happiness.

It is worth asking a simple question.

If you earned the same income but worked 20 fewer hours per week, would you exercise more, sleep better, eat healthier food, stress less, spend more time with family, and become a happier and healthier version of yourself?

Technology has always changed how humans work. Perhaps this new wave changes how humans live.

Retirement itself may also evolve.

For much of modern history retirement has been viewed as a hard stop. You work full time until a certain age, then you stop, but perhaps the future looks more flexible than that.

Maybe more people continue working in some capacity for longer, not because they are forced to but because healthier aging and technology allow them to contribute differently.

Perhaps people become part-time mentors, advisors, coaches, or specialists, sharing decades of knowledge on a fractional basis. Perhaps people spend more time helping grandchildren, supporting aging parents, contributing to charities, or participating more actively in local communities.

Maybe retirement becomes less about “stopping work” and more about gaining greater control over one’s time.

At the same time the world itself continues to evolve rapidly.

Fusion power may eventually reshape global energy systems. Precision medicine could dramatically improve how we treat disease. Research into the gut microbiome may transform how we think about immunity, chronic illness, and mental health, and space exploration may create entirely new industries over the coming decades.

Some of these technologies will succeed, some will fail, and most will probably take longer than people expect, but change is coming, regardless.

The challenge for retirees - and really for all of us - is not predicting the future perfectly. It is remaining adaptable enough to live well within it. That means being honest about the pressures, higher healthcare costs, reduced government support, and greater personal responsibility, while also embracing the opportunities, technology, healthier aging, greater flexibility, and potentially a better balance between work and life.

The future will not simply be worse or better.

It will be different.

And if we approach it thoughtfully, honestly, and with a degree of optimism, different does not necessarily have to mean frightening.

It may ultimately mean better.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Infratil Capital Bond offer

Infratil has announced an offer of 31-year Capital Bonds, with a likely redemption (repayment) in six years’ time.  The interest rate has not yet been set, although we expect the minimum rate to be at least 6.00% per annum, fixed for the first six-year term.

IFT is expected to pay the transaction costs associated with this offer, meaning clients are unlikely to pay brokerage. This will be confirmed next week.

IFT is a New Zealand-based infrastructure investment company. Its portfolio is diversified across digital infrastructure, renewable energy, healthcare and airports, with major investments including One NZ, CDC Data Centres, Wellington Airport and renewable energy platforms across several markets.

The offer opens on Tuesday, 2 June and closes at 10.00am on Friday, 5 June. Payment will be due no later than Friday, 12 June.

We have uploaded the offer documents to our website:

https://www.chrislee.co.nz/uploads//currentinvestments/IFT380.pdf

If you would like to register your interest, pending further information, please contact us promptly with the amount you may wish to invest and your CSN.

Please note that an indication of interest does not create any obligation or commitment to invest.

If you are an advised client of ours, you are welcome to contact us for our opinion on this offer.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

New Financial Advisor Position

We are currently looking to add an experienced Financial Adviser to the Chris Lee & Partners team.

This is a long-term role based in Paraparaumu, working closely with our long-standing clients throughout New Zealand.

If you are interested in learning more, please contact us confidentially at office@chrislee.co.nz

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Travel

29 May - Whangarei - David Colman

2 June - Wairarapa - Johnny Lee (morning full, pm only)

8 June – Nelson – Chris Lee (FULL)

9 June – Blenheim – Chris Lee (FULL)

30 June – Christchurch – Chris Lee (FULL)

1 July – Christchurch – Chris Lee (FULL)

Chris Lee & Partners Limited