Providing for old age

La retraite anticipée is early retirement, and the adjective is the trap. In French, anticipé is about the calendar and nothing else: it means brought forward, done sooner than the date first fixed. Un remboursement anticipé is paying a loan off early, des élections anticipées are a snap election, un départ anticipé is leaving before the appointed day, and par anticipation means in advance. The verb behaves the same way. Anticiper un paiement is to make it earlier, and anticiper sur ses revenus is to spend money one has not yet been paid. Even where French uses it of the mind, as in anticiper une difficulté, it means acting before the thing arrives and not merely reckoning that it will. English went the other way: « anticipated » now means expected, so « the anticipated shortfall » is one that has been forecast and « an anticipated retirement » would be a retirement people saw coming. Read une retraite anticipée like that and the sentence loses its whole point, which is that somebody left early and will be paid less for the rest of their life.