You can build your own retirement number tonight, in about an hour, with twelve months of bank statements and a pen. Most people never do it. The ones who do leave out a line that costs more than anything else on the page.
So let me hand you the method, and then the part people get wrong.
Start with what you spend, not what you make. Income is the wrong input because it includes taxes and savings, and neither of those follows you into retirement. Pull the last twelve months from your bank and card accounts and add it up. Not the budget. The budget is a story you tell yourself in January. Take the actual.
Then adjust it in both directions, honestly.
Some things stop. The commute. The saving itself, the line people forget to subtract. Maybe the mortgage, if it truly retires before you do.
Some things start. Health insurance, if you stop working before Medicare. More travel in the first ten years, because that is when you are healthy enough to use it. More health care in the last ten, because that is when you are not.
What comes out is your annual number. Now multiply it by years. If you stop at 62 and plan to 92, that is 30 years. That is the pile.
Now put a real balance next to it. Vanguard’s 2026 report covers about five million 401(k) accounts. The average balance is $167,970. The median is $44,115. The average is the one that gets quoted, because a small number of very large accounts drag it upward. The median is the account standing in the middle of the room.
So run it. If your annual number is $60,000, thirty years is $1.8 million in today’s dollars. The median 401(k) covers about nine months of that. The average covers under three years. Neither is a plan. That is not a reason to despair, it is a reason to stop treating one account as the answer.
Here is where it stops being simple.
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That pile is in today’s dollars, and 30 years does not leave dollars alone. At 3 percent, a cost roughly doubles in 24 years. The same life you priced out costs about twice as much at the end of the horizon as it does at the start. So the honest question is not how big your pile is. It is whether the pile produces income that climbs at least as fast as your costs do. A number that sits still loses to a number that grows, every single year, quietly.
Now the line nobody puts in the spreadsheet.
In the retirement plans people show me, the house gets one entry, and the entry is “paid off.” That is not a line item. That is a building.
I read buildings for a living, and I will tell you what a house is over 30 years. It is a collection of systems with known life expectancies. Roof, 20 to 25 years. HVAC, 15 to 20. Water heater, 10 to 12. Exterior paint or siding, windows, the sewer lateral running under the yard that nobody thinks about until it stops working.
Lay those against a 30 year retirement and the math is not ambiguous. You are buying at least one more roof. Probably two more heating and cooling systems. Two or three water heaters. Somewhere in there, one genuinely unpleasant plumbing event. That is not a risk. That is a schedule. The only unknown is which year.
A paid-off house is not a zero. It is an operating asset with a maintenance budget, and if you do not fund the budget the asset funds it for you, on its own timing, usually at the worst moment.
The cost of deferred maintenance is infinite. You have no idea. That is true when you are working, and it is worse when you are not, because a fixed income has no overtime. The roof does not care that it is a bad year.
Two more lines belong in there. Utilities. Nationally, rates escalate about 3 percent a year, and the last five years have run north of 5 percent. Whatever you are paying now is the floor, not the average.
Insurance. This one you can actually fight. Insurers price on what they assume about your house, not what they know. When I bought a house built in 1990, I was quoted like a 1990 house, same electrical, same mechanicals. I had already gutted and replaced all of it. Until I told them and showed them, I was paying a premium for a system that no longer existed. Documenting what you have replaced is one of the few times you get to lower a bill by writing an email.
So run it tonight. Twelve months of real spending, adjusted honestly. Times the years you plan to be here. Plus a house that is going to need a roof, two HVAC systems, and a plumber. Then ask whether what you have grows fast enough to keep up with what it costs.
The cost of waiting is not that you save less. It is that you find out later, when the number is fixed and the years are not.
—Jon