I’ve been contributing to my Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) for nearly half my life. Seventeen years sure seems like a long time, but looking back I’m glad I started when I did.

What got me thinking about my RRSP in my twenties wasn’t the mathy math showing the need to have millions of dollars saved by age 65. Nope. What shocked me into squeezing my savings and contributing to my RRSP was cat food.

cat food

Yes, I wrote cat food.

Not the dry crunchy stuff that comes in bags. No. I’m talkin’ tins, people. The moist, slimy, stinky, gelatinous lump of stank that slumps from an inverted can with something tasty like “Fancy Feast” written on the label.

Cat food.

The stuff of my nightmares since seeing a senior woman buy 25 cans of the stank stuff, stacked neatly on the grocery conveyor ahead of me. Being a nosy and conversational grocery shopper, I couldn’t help but ask her how many cats she owned. “None,” she replied.

I always thought seniors eating cat food to afford food was a myth. I wanted to be sure. So I kept asking the woman about cats. She threw me a side-eye and said nothing.

I was a stupid 20ish-year-old. Whether she ate the cat food or not didn’t matter. My fear of eating Fancy Feast in retirement was very real.

This is a grim story, so I’m sorry. But this is a true story, and the truth is sometimes grim. Since I don’t like the smell of cat food, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like the taste of cat food either. I started contributing to my RRSP that week.

This post was supposed to be fun, and then it got owned by Fluffy. Don’t get owned by Fluffy, or frisky, or feasts of fancy. Start thinking today about tomorrow and get some money into your retirement plan now.

This post has been brought to you by a can of cat food.

Your Turn: Has anything ever scared you into saving for retirement? It’s reality check time!