It's a question I used to ask myself in my early 20s, watching the news about the pension system: will there even be a pension by the time I retire? Nobody has a certain answer, and that uncertainty is exactly why I decided not to rely on it alone.
The question isn't whether, it's how much
There will almost certainly still be a public pension system in 30 or 40 years. The real issue isn't whether the system exists, it's the amount: there are fewer workers contributing per retiree every year, which pushes down the average pension relative to your last salary (what's known as the replacement rate).
In other words: you'll probably get something, but it's reasonable to expect it will cover a smaller share of your final salary than it does for today's retirees.
Why this changes how I plan
If you assume the public pension will cover your current lifestyle when you retire, your retirement savings plan is probably zero, or close to it. That's the most common trap: thinking "the state will handle it" and building nothing alongside it.
I prefer to flip that around: I treat the public pension as a floor, not the whole plan. Whatever arrives will be a base. Everything else — my actual financial independence — depends on what I build on my own.
How I apply this in practice
This doesn't mean stopping contributions or being pessimistic for no reason. It means two concrete things:
- Investing independently of the public system, with automatic monthly contributions (my usual DCA strategy), built for a 20–30 year horizon.
- Calculating with real numbers, not hope, what retirement pension I'd actually get based on my current career, so I know how much I need to make up on my own. A retirement viability calculator gives a far more honest estimate than "we'll see."
Compound interest does the heavy lifting
The good thing about starting young is that time works in your favor. A modest monthly contribution over 30 years, with compound interest working in the background, builds wealth that can supplement — or in some cases comfortably exceed — what the public system would provide.
You don't need to save heroic amounts from your first paycheck. You need to start early and stay consistent, which is exactly the opposite of waiting until 45 to "get serious about retirement."
My takeaway
I don't know for certain what pension I'll get in 35 years, and I suspect nobody really does. But that no longer worries me the way it used to, because I stopped depending on that answer. I'm building my own retirement in parallel, and whatever comes from the public system is welcome as a bonus.
That's the difference between waiting for an answer nobody can give you, and taking control of the part that actually depends on you.