Are everyday expenses stopping you from saving for retirement? Photograph: Getty
And so we find ourselves at the start of another working week. Depressing, eh? And it doesn't get better if you start thinking of how many more there are to go before the end of the year (41, less the four or five most employers offer as holidays) or, and this is the really soul-destroying bit, before you retire.
I reckon I've got at least 1,518 more weeks to go before I can hang up my keyboard - and that's assuming I get generous holidays from every employer between now and the day I retire. It's little wonder many of us contemplate early retirement. But at the same time as we dream of a life free of work, a large number of us fail to do anything to make it a reality.
In yesterday's Observer, Jill Insley and Lisa Bachelor looked at the reasons so few of us are investing in pensions, and added another potential disincentive to the list: the credit crunch.
News today that the markets are in freefall again following the near collapse of American investment bank Bear Stearns will only add to private investors' jitters and compound the problems faced by those approaching retirement.
But for anyone with a long-term investment horizon diving markets offer an opportunity to buy shares at a knock down price. If you are in your 20s or 30s, even if you plan an extravagantly early retirement, you have at least 20 years for your investments to turn a profit - if you ever believed the stock market was the place to invest, now is the time to do it.
So are you the type of person who is willing to buy even when everyone is running in the opposite direction? Or do you have good reasons why you are putting your pension saving off to another day? In yesterday's article, one expert suggested people should be compelled to save - do you agree, or would you rather be left to make your own arrangements for life after work?
