The Modern Retirement Planning Industry is Unbiblical and is Destroying Our Future

How Modern Retirement Planning Trains Your Children to Abandon You and Your Grandchildren to Abandon Them

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For most of human history, the idea that a man would stop working at an arbitrary age and live off accumulated savings or government payments would have seemed absurd. Men worked until their bodies gave out, and when they could no longer labor, their children cared for them. This arrangement wasn't sentimental. It was the basic architecture of civilization.

Then, in the span of roughly eighty years, Western governments dismantled this structure and replaced it with something unprecedented: state-funded retirement. The results have been catastrophic for the Christian family.

The Historical Record

Otto von Bismarck introduced the first modern pension system in Germany in 1889. His motives were explicitly political. He sought to undercut the growing socialist movement by offering workers state benefits, while simultaneously creating a new form of dependency on the government. The retirement age was set at seventy, conveniently higher than most workers' life expectancy at the time.

The Bolsheviks formalized state pensions in 1922 as part of their broader program to replace the family with the state as the primary social unit. They understood something most Christians have forgotten: whoever provides for people in their vulnerability controls them. The elderly had always depended on their children. Soviet planners transferred that dependency to the state.

The United States followed with the Social Security Act of 1935. The program was sold as compassionate assistance for the elderly poor, but its effect was far more revolutionary. For the first time in American history, the government claimed responsibility for providing income to retired citizens regardless of need.

Medicare arrived in 1965, completing the transfer. Now the state would provide not just income but healthcare for the elderly. The federal government had fully assumed the role that Scripture assigns to children.

Within two generations, the multi-generational household nearly disappeared from American life.

The Ideological Foundation

These programs rest on two foundational claims, both antithetical to biblical anthropology.

First, they assert that the elderly have no productive value. A man reaches sixty-five or sixty-seven, and suddenly he is reclassified from worker to retiree, from productive citizen to welfare recipient. His decades of experience, his accumulated wisdom, his capacity for governance and mentorship are deemed irrelevant. He is encouraged to cease productive work and pursue leisure until death.

This is a fundamentally materialist view of human worth. It measures a person's value purely by current economic output and discards those whose output declines. Scripture offers no such category. The Bible presents old age as a time of honor, wisdom, and continued contribution to family and community, not as a waiting room for death.

Second, these programs assert that families are optional. The state can and should replace the natural bonds between parents and children with bureaucratic provision. Your father raised you, fed you, sheltered you, and trained you for thirty years. When he grows old, the government will handle it. You are released from obligation.

This is the essence of socialist family policy. Every totalitarian regime in the twentieth century worked to weaken family bonds and replace them with state dependency. They understood that strong families create loyalties that compete with loyalty to the state. Dispersed, atomized individuals are easier to control than cohesive multi-generational clans.

American Christians looked at these programs and saw compassion. We should have seen what they actually were: a state-sponsored assault on the fifth commandment.

What Scripture Commands

The biblical teaching on family obligation is not ambiguous.

Paul writes in First Timothy 5:8, "If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." This is not rhetorical exaggeration. Paul equates failure to provide for family with apostasy. A man who neglects his relatives has abandoned the faith, regardless of his doctrinal professions.

This provision flows in both directions. Fathers provide for minor children. Adult children provide for aging parents. The lifecycle of family obligation is covenant faithfulness across generations.

Paul makes this explicit four verses earlier: "If a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show godliness to their own household and to make some return to their parents, for this is pleasing in the sight of God" (1 Timothy 5:4). The responsibility of adult children to care for their aging parents is not optional charity. It is godliness. It is how children honor their father and mother, fulfilling the fifth commandment beyond childhood and into their parents' final years.

This structure assumes multi-generational proximity and cooperation. Elderly parents live with or very near their adult children. Grandparents help raise grandchildren while the middle generation works and provides. Everyone contributes what they can. Everyone is cared for according to their need. The family functions as an integrated economic and social unit across three or four generations.

But Social Security and Medicare made this unnecessary.

The Mechanisms of Destruction

Once the state began providing income and healthcare to the elderly, the covenant bonds that held families together geographically and economically began to fray.

Why would your parents need to live near you when they have their own income? Why would you need to plan your career around caring for them when Medicare will pay for their medical needs? Why would they move in with you when they can afford their own place in a warmer climate?

The practical necessities that once kept families together disappeared. And without those necessities, families scattered.

I spent over a decade working in financial services. I watched this pattern repeat endlessly. Couple retires at sixty-five with Social Security, Medicare, and some combination of pension or retirement savings. They are financially independent from their children. They move to Florida or Arizona. They buy a condo. They pursue leisure.

Their adult children, no longer needed for support, move wherever career opportunities take them. Dallas, Seattle, Denver. Nobody lives within three hundred miles of anyone else. The grandchildren see their grandparents twice a year, maybe.

For ten or fifteen years, this arrangement appears successful. The retirees enjoy their independence. The adult children pursue their careers without the burden of caring for aging parents. Everyone congratulates themselves on their good planning.

Then the parents hit their late seventies or early eighties. Health declines. Hip fractures, heart problems, cancer, dementia. Suddenly they need help with daily activities. But their children live a thousand miles away with jobs and mortgages and kids in school.

What happens? The parents move into assisted living. Then a nursing home. They spend their final years warehoused with strangers, visited occasionally when the children can arrange a trip. They die surrounded by paid staff, not family.

This scenario is so common it barely registers as tragic anymore. We have normalized putting our parents in institutions to die among strangers. We have convinced ourselves that this is acceptable, even compassionate.

It is covenant unfaithfulness.

The Generational Transfer

The children who put their parents in nursing homes have children of their own. Those grandchildren are learning, by observation, what family obligation looks like when it becomes inconvenient. They are learning that when people get old and needy, you hire someone else to deal with them. They are learning that family bonds are contingent, lasting only as long as they remain pleasant and easy.

When those grandchildren grow up and have their own children, they will repeat the pattern. Each generation more isolated than the last. Each generation less willing to sacrifice personal convenience for family cohesion.

The sociologists call this "family atomization." Scripture might call it covenant breaking.

And it all traces back to the lie that government programs can replace family obligation without consequence.

The Alternative

There is a different way, though it requires rejecting nearly everything modern American culture assumes about aging and retirement.

You refuse to retire.

Not because you love your job so much you cannot imagine stopping. Not because you need the money. You refuse to retire because retirement is a category error. It assumes that a man's productive years have an expiration date, that at some arbitrary age he should cease meaningful work and spend his remaining time pursuing leisure.

Scripture knows no such pattern. Abraham is making covenant agreements and fathering children in old age. Moses leads Israel until he dies at one hundred twenty. Caleb asks for mountains to conquer at eighty-five. Paul plants churches and writes letters from prison in his sixties. These men transition from warrior to elder, from operator to statesman, but they never stop working.

You follow that pattern.

In your forties and fifties, you build. You establish the business, train your sons, develop the systems, acquire the property. You are in the thick of operations, solving daily problems, driving growth.

In your sixties and seventies, you transition. Your sons take operational leadership. You move to governance, strategy, major relationships. You work fewer hours, but the hours carry more weight. You are coaching, advising, providing the wisdom that comes only from decades of experience.

In your eighties, if God grants them, you are the patriarch. You bless. You counsel. You pray. You represent continuity and living memory of family history. You are not producing wealth at the same rate, but you are producing something more valuable: coherence and wisdom for the generations coming after you.

At no point do you become useless. At no point do you cash out and move away. At no point do you sever yourself from productive contribution to family and community.

This model requires planning.

Biblical Retirement Planning

Multi-generational faithfulness does not happen accidentally. It requires intentional structuring of your business, your estate, and your family culture.

Start with geography. If you allow your adult children to scatter across the country chasing career opportunities, you have already lost. They need to understand, from adolescence forward, that proximity to family is not optional. They will build their careers within a reasonable distance of the family home. Not in the same house necessarily, but near enough for regular interaction and mutual support.

This means you may need to create economic opportunities that keep them close. If you own a business, structure it so your sons can build careers within it. If you own land, develop it so multiple households can live on it. If your trade cannot support multiple families, help your sons establish related enterprises nearby.

Work with qualified estate planning attorneys and CPAs to structure ownership that facilitates multi-generational continuity rather than dispersal. The default structures most professionals use are designed for asset liquidation and equal distribution among heirs. That model scatters families. You need structures that keep property and enterprise intact across generations.

Think about housing differently. The American assumption is that each nuclear family needs a separate house in a different subdivision. That assumption guarantees geographic dispersal. Consider instead: multi-family properties, adjacent lots, compounds. Arrangements where multiple generations live in proximity, not necessarily under the same roof, but close enough for daily interaction.

Your adult children need to plan their lives around the inevitability of your declining health. Not as a crisis to manage when it arrives, but as a foreseeable reality to prepare for. They will care for you. Not grudgingly, when all other options are exhausted, but as a planned expression of covenant faithfulness.

When you can no longer live independently, you do not move to a facility. You move in with your children or they arrange care in your home. Strangers do not attend your final years. Your children do. Your grandchildren see it happen. They learn what covenant faithfulness looks like in practice.

The Financial Reality

None of this means you should avoid saving or building financial margin. It means you reframe why you are saving.

You are not building a retirement fund to finance thirty years of leisure. You are building assets that will generate income during your transition from operator to elder. You are creating reserves so that when you are seventy-five and cannot work forty-hour weeks anymore, you are not financially dependent on your children even as you live with or near them.

You are building estate assets that will pass to your children and grandchildren intact, funding the next generation's continuation of the work.

The numbers may look similar to conventional retirement planning. The purpose is entirely different. You are not planning to exit. You are planning to transition while maintaining productivity and family cohesion.

Work with financial advisors who understand legacy, not just retirement. Most advisors are trained to get you to retirement and manage your withdrawal strategy. You need someone who can help you structure for multi-generational transfer while maintaining your role and dignity.

Consult with attorneys who understand multi-generational estate planning. Tax efficiency matters, but family cohesion matters more. Sometimes the structure that minimizes taxes also maximizes family dispersal. Choose cohesion.

And understand that this path requires sacrifice from everyone. Your children sacrifice career advancement opportunities in distant cities. You sacrifice the dream of retirement leisure in a warm climate. Your grandchildren grow up with less privacy than their peers in nuclear family arrangements.

But here is what you gain.

What Is Recovered

You die surrounded by your children and grandchildren. Not in a hospital bed with a nurse checking vitals every four hours. In your home or your son's home, with your family present.

Your final years are lived in dignity, cared for by people who love you and whom you have loved since they drew breath. You are not a burden. You are honored.

Your wisdom is not wasted. You spend your seventies and eighties teaching grandchildren, advising your sons, providing governance for the family enterprise. The knowledge accumulated over seventy or eighty years is transferred to the next generation instead of dying with you.

Your grandchildren learn covenant faithfulness by watching it lived. They see their parents care for you. They learn that family takes care of family. They absorb, at a formative age, that love is not just a feeling but a set of obligations faithfully discharged.

They learn to honor the elderly, not as a nice sentiment, but as a practical reality. They see that old people have value. That experience and wisdom matter. That a person's worth is not measured by current economic productivity.

When those grandchildren have children of their own, they will replicate what they learned. The cycle strengthens instead of degenerating.

This is legacy. Not just wealth passed down, though that matters. Legacy is patterns of faithfulness reproduced across generations. It is family culture strong enough to resist the atomizing pressures of modern life.

That is what the welfare state stole from us. That is what retirement and Social Security destroyed.

A Final Word

I am not naive about the challenges. Multi-generational living is hard. Aging parents can be difficult. Adult children can be selfish. Not every family has the relational health to make this work without significant conflict.

I am also not suggesting that every family situation is identical. Some elderly people have no children. Some children are estranged through no fault of the parents. Some medical situations require institutional care that families cannot provide at home.

I am not pronouncing judgment on every person who has used Social Security or Medicare or placed a parent in a nursing home. The system we inherited was built before most of us were born. We navigate it as best we can with the options available.

What I am saying is this: we need to recognize what these programs actually are and what they have done. They are not neutral tools we can use without consequence. They are built on assumptions hostile to biblical family structure. They have weakened family bonds and normalized covenant unfaithfulness.

And we can choose differently.

We can refuse to build our lives around government dependency in old age. We can structure our businesses, our estates, our family culture for multi-generational cohesion instead of dispersal. We can teach our children that caring for aging parents is not optional but commanded.

We can reject the socialist lie that the elderly have no value and that the state can replace the family.

It will cost you. It will require you to make decisions your neighbors and colleagues will not understand. It will mean saying no to opportunities that would scatter your family. It will mean less autonomy and more obligation for everyone involved.

But the alternative is what we see all around us: old people dying alone in institutions, families scattered across the continent with minimal contact, children learning that love has limits and obligations expire when they become inconvenient.

Choose the harder path. Build families that last. Care for your parents and teach your children to care for you.

That is what biblical fathers do.

Let’s Connect

If you've been feeling the weight of unanswered questions like:

• "Am I building something my sons can lead, or just a job I'll sell?"

• "What happens to my family if I die tomorrow?"

• "Will my children scatter across the country, or stay close enough to care for me when I'm old?"

• "Am I planning for retirement leisure, or multi-generational faithfulness?"

• "Is my business structured to endure for my grandchildren, or will it die with me?"

Then let's talk.

Imagine ending 2026 with a clear plan for transitioning from warrior to elder. A business succession strategy that trains your sons instead of selling to strangers. Estate structures that keep your family geographically close and covenantally faithful. A roadmap that ensures you die surrounded by your children and grandchildren, not alone in a facility.

That is what biblical retirement planning creates.

And you were never meant to build alone. Fathers need counsel from men who understand both balance sheets and biblical manhood, who can help you structure your affairs for generational continuity instead of state-dependent retirement.

The welfare state offers you government checks and institutional care. Scripture calls you to something far greater: a house that endures for a century, sons who honor you by carrying on your work, and great-grandchildren who inherit both wealth and faithfulness.

Choose the harder path. Build families that last.

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Final Encouragement

Remember, you were never meant to do this alone. Let us walk alongside you in building a plan that brings clarity, confidence, and legacy for the next season of your life and leadership.

*Dominion Business Advisors LLC provides strategic business consulting and exit planning services. We do not provide legal, tax, or investment advice. Information in this article is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as specific advice for your situation. Please consult your attorney, CPA, and financial advisor before implementing any exit planning strategies.