The 5-Minute 'Do I Have Enough' Math

Retirement Income

67% of Americans now say they worry more about running out of money than about death.

Not spiders. Not public speaking. Death, and running out of money beats it. That's from Allianz's 2026 retirement study, and the number has climbed every single year they've asked (57% in 2022). The industry even coined an acronym for it now: FORO. Fear of running out.

Here's what strikes me about that statistic: most of the 67% have never actually run their own numbers. The fear lives in the fog. So tonight, five minutes, three steps, no calculator login, no email capture. Let's turn the fog into a number.

Step one: your real annual spending

Not a budget category guess. Pull up twelve months of bank and card statements and find what actually left your accounts. Include the property taxes, the insurance, the Christmas spending, the vet bills. For most couples this lands somewhere between $60K and $110K and surprises them in one direction or the other.

Say our hypothetical couple (invented, not real clients) finds $84,000.

Step two: subtract the paychecks that never stop

Social Security continues for life and adjusts for inflation. Get both real numbers from ssa.gov (not the averages, YOURS) and subtract them. Our couple expects $58,000 combined at full retirement age.

$84,000 of spending minus $58,000 of Social Security = $26,000. That's the gap. That's the only number the portfolio actually has to produce. Notice how much smaller it is than the spending number: this is why national headlines about needing $1.46M are noise. The portfolio doesn't fund your retirement. It funds the GAP.

Step three: multiply the gap by 25

$26,000 x 25 = $650,000.

That's the 4% rule inverted: a portfolio of 25 times your gap can historically sustain that withdrawal, inflation-adjusted, for a 30-year retirement. Our couple needs roughly $650K, not $1.46M, because their Social Security does the heavy lifting.

Your version might say $400K. It might say $2.5M. Either way, you now know something 67% of the country is losing sleep over without ever calculating.

The asterisk (this is the part the calculators skip)

The napkin math assumes things the real world doesn't promise. Three of them matter enough to name.

It assumes you retire at 65 with Medicare waiting. Retire at 61 and you add the bridge-insurance years and shrink the Social Security checks.

It assumes average markets in your first decade. A crash in years one through five of retirement, while you're withdrawing, does damage that a crash in year fifteen doesn't. Sequence risk is why "25x the gap" is a starting line, not a finish line.

And it assumes your spending is flat forever. MetLife's 2026 study found 62% of pre-retirees underestimated what they'd need and 61% overestimated how long their savings would last. The sobering detail: one in five retirees who took their savings as a lump sum burned through it in four and a half years. The math wasn't their problem. The plan was.

So here's the honest framing. The napkin tells you if you're in the neighborhood. It cannot stress-test the neighborhood for fires. That's what actual planning does: it takes your 25x number and asks what happens if you retire into 2008, if one of you needs memory care, if the roof and the market fail the same year.

Run the napkin tonight. If the number scares you, you just learned that with years left to fix it. If the number comforts you, pressure-test it before you trust it.

Either way, you've left the 67%.