The biggest retirement fear is running out of money. For a lot of retirees, the real problem is the opposite.
About a third of them reach their mid-80s with as much as they started with, or more. They saved for a life they never quite let themselves live.
That figure comes from a study by EBRI, a nonpartisan research group. It found that about a third of retirees still hold all their savings by their mid-80s.
Researchers there say that's a sign people are being far too careful. The opposite risk is real too.
About a fifth of people who retired with more than $500,000 had less than 20% left by the same age. So there are two ways to get it wrong.
Spend too fast, and you run dry. Spend too slow, and you miss out.
Either way, the money and the life it was meant for drift apart. Planning what to do with it is half the battle.
Market Briefs breaks down the smart moves every morning, plus a free investing masterclass when you join.
The hardest part is mental. You spend your whole working life saving and watching the number grow.
Then flipping to watch it shrink just feels wrong. It doesn't help that many of today's retirees lived through a great run in the stock market after 2008.
Their savings kept growing on their own, which made it easy to never touch the original pile. But holding on too tight has a cost.
It's like saving a nice bottle of wine for a special day that never comes. Then it's gone, undrunk.
There's a bigger shift behind all this. Older generations often had a pension that paid them for life, while today most people manage a 401(k) on their own.
So the hard job of turning savings into income now falls on you.
A common starting point is the 4% rule. You pull out 4% of your savings in year one, so $40,000 from a $1 million pot.
After that, you give yourself a small raise each year to keep up with rising prices. That income sits on top of Social Security.
The catch: the rule leans on careful math, so it can quietly push people into spending too little in retirement.
One fix is to stay flexible. Take out a bit more in strong market years, and pull back in weak ones.
That way your spending bends with your savings, instead of ignoring them. Spending also tends to follow a U-shape.
People spend more early in retirement, slow down in the middle, then spend more late on care. A little side work in down years can take the pressure off too.
One rule still applies, though. Past a certain age, the law makes you pull a minimum amount from some accounts each year.
A third of retirees reach their 80s having barely touched their savings. The money outlived the chance to enjoy it.
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