Deciding for a secure tomorrow: Proactive decision-making and retirement financial planning behavior

• Proactive decision-making influences retirement financial planning behavior • Trainable, proactive cognitive skills foster retirement financial planning behavior • Effect of proactive cognitive skills fully mediated by four psychological traits • Positive mediation via general self-efficacy, planning, confidence, risk tolerance • Financial literacy, numeracy significant moderators; effects align across groups Retirement financial planning behavior (RFPB) encompasses the concrete actions individuals take to prepare financially for retirement. We examine RFPB from an Operational Research (OR) perspective using Decision Analysis (DA) principles—decision quality and value-focused thinking—operationalized via proactive decision-making (PDM), which integrates DA-grounded proactive cognitive skills (PCS) with proactive personality traits derived from the organizational behavior literature. Using cross-sectional survey data from 457 UK adults and structural equation modeling with systematic model comparisons and multigroup tests, we assess whether PDM influences RFPB through four psychological traits—propensity to plan, confidence in financial information search, willingness to accept investment risk, and general self-efficacy—and whether relationships differ by financial literacy and numeracy. Results show that PDM affects RFPB entirely through these psychological traits (full mediation), with PCS—the trainable, DA-grounded decision-analytic skills—serving as the operative mechanism, while proactive personality traits are non-significant in this pathway. The mediated model explains 57.1% of RFPB variance and outperforms partial-mediation, traits-only, and reverse-causality alternatives. Multigroup analyses indicate that the indirect structure holds across financial literacy and numeracy groups, with patterns suggesting a compensatory role of PCS under lower financial literacy. Together, the evidence links DA-grounded decision-analytic skills to RFPB. Our findings highlight the potential of PCS-focused decision-analytic competence training as an OR-relevant mechanism to promote RFPB, complementing financial literacy and numeracy programs. Additionally, our study complements optimization-focused OR approaches to retirement financial planning by identifying PCS as a decision-analytic lever that strengthens RFPB—the behavioral precondition for adopting such optimized prescriptions in practice.