The fear of never having enough to retire
Doesn’t matter if you’ve got £100,000 or £2 million in savings - almost everyone I talk to thinks they’ll never get to ‘enough’.
Doesn’t matter if you’ve got £100,000 or £2 million in savings - almost everyone I talk to thinks they’ll never get to ‘enough’. There’s always a bit more saving to do. Always a bigger number in mind. But at some point, we need to recognise when that fear tips into the irrational.
It’s hardwired. Humans have been worrying about running out since we were stashing food for winter in caves. Back then it was dried meat and grain. Now it’s retirement savings. Same brain, different fears.
Psychologists call the first concern loss aversion — we feel the pain of losing something about twice as strongly as the pleasure of gaining it. So when you imagine running out of money, your brain reacts like it’s already happening, and it pushes you to keep chasing “just a bit more” for safety.
Think about it like this: when you gain £50,000 in your retirement account it feels good. But when you imagine losing £50,000 from it, it feels much worse. So much worse that your brain over-weights the risk and keeps you stockpiling “just in case.”
It’s one of the big reasons why even very financially secure people still fear running out of money — it’s not purely rational; it’s hardwired into our caveman brains.
Then there’s another psychological quirk called future uncertainty bias. Your brain hates not knowing what’s ahead, so it overestimates the risks and fuels your fears. Even if the numbers show you’re fine, the what-ifs - market crashes, health problems, living far longer than expected - make you feel like you need an even bigger safety net.
Add in today’s noise with market headlines, rising living costs, not knowing how long you’ll live or what family curveballs might come, it’s no wonder your head says keep going, you’re not there yet.
And, not surprisingly, even when you hit the number you thought was enough, your brain quietly slides the goalposts. That’s why the feeling never really disappears.
So how do you stop it running the show?
1. Get clear on your numbers
Write your staged midlife and retirement budget. Know what you spend now, what you might spend later, and where the money’s coming from. And remember — you’ve got more levers than you think: pensions, investments, downsizing, part-time work, delaying the big spends until later, and if all else fails, the state pension will be there to catch you.
2. Give yourself breathing room
Build in a buffer. It doesn’t have to be huge - just enough that you can handle a surprise without it wrecking your plan.
3. Focus on the life, not the number
The real win isn’t hitting some magic balance. It’s knowing what you want life to look like and having more than one way to fund it. As I say in the front of both my books - we’re chasing a number that will give us choice, not the perfect or biggest number we can have. And you’ve no doubt heard the old adage - there’s no point being the richest chump in the graveyard.
That fear? It might always be there in the background. But with a plan, you can turn it into background noise — instead of the thing keeping you up at night.
Do you feel the fear?
An amazing couple of weeks
If you’re reading this (my international edition), you’re probably outside Australia — which means, for now, you can’t get a localised edition of my books How to Have an Epic Retirement and Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife. Yet!
Sure, you can grab the Kindle/ebook editions of both and skip over the Aussie-specific finance bits (only about a fifth of each book), and you’ll still get the lessons.
But that’s changing.
The UK edition of How to Have an Epic Retirement is now in its final proofread. This week I’ve been batting around cover designs with my UK publishing team. It’s a complete rewrite tailored to the UK’s financial systems and local retirement resources, and it’s due for release in December 2025. Sign up here to be first to see the cover, get pre-order details, and access exclusive bonuses.
New Zealand will be folded into a new combined Australia & New Zealand edition — also in its final proofread — for release this December. (Yes… I’ve been working hard!) Sign up here for prerelease info - to get the cover reveal, pre-order info, and launch updates as soon as they drop.
And I’m hoping we’ll have a publisher locked in for How to Have an Epic Retirement in North America very soon — it’s already in the writing stage. If you’re in the US or Canada, register here to be first to hear about the release date, see the cover, and grab your pre-order offers.
After that, Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife will follow. That one comes second for a reason: it’s the prequel to the retirement story. My logic? Unless we’ve shown people how to retire the easy way using the systems available to them, it doesn’t make much sense to jump straight into how to shape your midlife so you can enjoy it and then have an epic retirement too. (Or maybe it does — but I like an orderly conversation!)
Now… I’m taking a moment to celebrate, because living for today as well as tomorrow is exactly what Prime Timers do. Did you hear my news? Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife has just hit #1 bestselling self-help book in Australia this week, and was the #4 non-fiction title overall, just behind Mel Robbins and a couple of very good cookbooks. And it was in the top 20 bestselling books in the country. I’ll take that!
Note: if you are reading this newsletter and you’re Australian then you’re in the wrong newsletter - please sign up for the Aussie newsletter here at epicretirement.net and unsubscribe from this one. I write a weekly very localised Aussie newsletter.
Got thoughts this week — send an email to bec@epicretirement.net. I read every one.
Cheers, Bec Wilson
Author, podcast host, columnist, retirement educator, and guest speakerAs
Don’t forget, Prime Time is available for pre-order now on Amazon Australia here.
Want to buy the books overseas
You can purchase a copy as an ebook from Amazon, or Apple Books online - or get them as an audiobook worldwide from your favourite online bookseller (Spotify Plus or Audible).
Before you quit your job and sell the house... read this!
Everything I share here is general information, not personal financial, legal or tax advice. It hasn’t been tailored to your specific life, goals, money situation, or brilliant retirement plans—so before making any big decisions, please chat to a licensed financial adviser or relevant professional who can look at your individual circumstances.
I do my best to keep things accurate and current, but I can’t guarantee it (rules change, governments shuffle things around, and I’m only human). Any figures or examples are just that—examples—to help explain things, and they might not reflect the latest laws or your actual numbers.
Use this as a helpful guide, not gospel.