“ Several studies have shown that, on average, people spend around 93% to 97% as much in retirement as they did when they were working.”

When I do fully retire - planning on next year when the youngest kiddo graduates high school - if we are spending less then we do now something has gone wrong.

At least this study talks about percentage of pre and post retirement spending, rather than needing a % of your pre-retirement income. It used to be that the convention was you should expect to need IIRC 80% of your working income in retirement. Considering we spent less than 50% and saved the rest, we certainly were going to need less than 80%. That fact actually stumped a few very recommended financial planners we had try to get our business, until I pulled out the spreadsheets and showed them why indeed we could retire at 55. I am sure there are a few gems in that professions, but the FPs we encountered were salesmen using false truisms to show how smart they were.

The one expense I expected to pay a lot less of in retirement is taxes, but because of our earning years having been in the age of Traditional IRAs, with Roth only coming at the very end, we throw about $100K in taxes a year to the various gov'ts for Roth conversions. I guess I should have put more thought into it when IRAs came about, and listened to the guy on TMF who was talking about it being better just to hold stock in a taxable account, but we simply threw the max in our 401K and IRAs, where we invested it. We counted on our kids simply getting the inherited IRAs, which they could then use with RMDs, but those are no longer able to be passed down as originally detailed and must be drawn down in 10 years. This would result in a huge tax bill for our kids, so we are trying to minimize that with conversions.

It's a first world problem when it comes to retirement.

We did not pay off our mortgage. I like the inflation hedge of a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. I love paying our 2% mortgage while the cash to pay it off earns 4.25%. Having a mortgage also makes it more difficult for someone to fraudulently sell your house from under you, which bizarrely is a thing that is apparently without recourse.

If you count saving for a retirement as an expense, and had we avoided the TIRA tax issue, we absolutely would be spending much less in retirement than we did on the way here. No more college expenses, way less commuting, clothing purchases are discretionary. We do travel extensively, but for us that means renting apartments rather than hotels. Health insurance is a higher cost for us now that DH is on Medicare and we lost retiree health care. Even when I get on Medicare, it will be more expensive than retiree healthcare was for the 2 of us, but it was a great perk of the job and not applicable to most.

I guess that's a long way of saying to look at your retirement accounts for future taxability. See where your potential liabilities are and analyze your best path to minimize them.

IP