People tend to ask “what age can I retire?” It is the wrong question. Retirement isn’t really an age at all — it’s a number. Reach it, and the age becomes a choice. Fall short of it, and no birthday will make the maths work. This video walks through the general method for estimating that number, so it stops being a vague worry and becomes something you can actually see.
Why it’s a number, not an age
An age is arbitrary. The number is what matters: the amount of capital that could reasonably support the life you want, for as long as you need it, without depending on income you are no longer earning. Once you know it, retirement stops being about reaching a certain birthday and starts being about reaching a target. That shift alone changes how people plan.
The general method
In the video I walk through the approach at a high level. Broadly, it involves working through a few connected questions:
- What does the life you want cost? Not a round guess — a realistic annual figure for how you actually intend to live.
- Adjust it for the future. Costs rarely stand still, so the number has to be expressed in future money, not today’s.
- Factor in where you’ll be. For internationally mobile people, location changes both costs and the picture significantly.
- Work back to the capital required. From a sustainable annual figure, you can estimate the pool of assets that could support it.
The specifics depend entirely on your circumstances, which is why this is a method rather than a magic figure. But even a rough version is transformative, because it replaces “I hope it’s enough” with an actual target to aim at.
Reality, then direction, then structure
Calculating your number is direction. It sits between an honest look at reality and the structure you build to get there. Without it, you are saving into a void; with it, every decision has something to point at. The weak link in most retirement plans is the absence of this single figure — everything downstream is guesswork until it exists.
Watch more in the full Planning on Purpose video series on YouTube.