Oct 14, 2026 · 12 min · 8 segments
In this episode of the Pre-Retirement Navigated podcast, host Will Hoffman discusses the importance of focusing on personal retirement plans rather than comparing oneself to others. He emphasizes the…
Will HoffmanHost
What we're gonna talk about today is, is your savings runway and how to check that against what you want your retirement plan to be.
And the reason it happens five years out is it gives you enough time to start saving more.
It gives you enough time to think about if you wanna have supplemental income when you retire.
This is one of those things that the information that gets revealed from this exercise, time becomes the biggest ally when it comes to fixing these things.
Quite frankly, depending on where you are in your plan, if you're listening to this, it may not be something that, that needs to wait until five years before.
It's something that you should maybe be doing at the beginning of your retirement savings.
So if you are in your 20s, and you are just starting your first job and just starting your first career, and you are already looking to 40 years from now and when you wanna retire, this is probably the first exercise that you should put yourself through to understand, "Okay, this is what retirement's going to cost 40 years from now.
How do I make sure I'm saving enough?" Forget about the investments, forget about the portfolio, forget about the income landing, all of those things, and making sure you're saving enough.
This is the thing that should be dominating all of our thought processes when it comes to retirement planning, regardless of age, regardless of income, regardless of expenses.
Am I able to save enough? How am I able to calculate if I'm gonna be able to save enough to get to retirement? But when you're five years out, this is when you want to, to do these exercises because, one, it allows you to ignore that stupid article or that dumb headline that's gonna hit every...
Everybody that publishes something financial is gonna say, "Are you saving enough? Do you have what your peers have?" So it allows you to just brush that off and go read something that's a bit more entertaining or a bit more knowledge, uh, inducing than get caught up in this keeping up with the Joneses attitude.
But when we see these headlines and we hear the average, the average is not a typical number.
It could be pulled up by a small number of large accounts, half or below that average, and probably well below that average.
What we're gonna talk about today is, is your savings runway and how to check that against what you want your retirement plan to be.
And the reason it happens five years out is it gives you enough time to start saving more.
It gives you enough time to think about if you wanna have supplemental income when you retire.
This is one of those things that the information that gets revealed from this exercise, time becomes the biggest ally when it comes to fixing these things.
Quite frankly, depending on where you are in your plan, if you're listening to this, it may not be something that, that needs to wait until five years before.
It's something that you should maybe be doing at the beginning of your retirement savings.
So if you are in your 20s, and you are just starting your first job and just starting your first career, and you are already looking to 40 years from now and when you wanna retire, this is probably the first exercise that you should put yourself through to understand, "Okay, this is what retirement's going to cost 40 years from now.
How do I make sure I'm saving enough?" Forget about the investments, forget about the portfolio, forget about the income landing, all of those things, and making sure you're saving enough.
This is the thing that should be dominating all of our thought processes when it comes to retirement planning, regardless of age, regardless of income, regardless of expenses.
Am I able to save enough? How am I able to calculate if I'm gonna be able to save enough to get to retirement? But when you're five years out, this is when you want to, to do these exercises because, one, it allows you to ignore that stupid article or that dumb headline that's gonna hit every...
Everybody that publishes something financial is gonna say, "Are you saving enough? Do you have what your peers have?" So it allows you to just brush that off and go read something that's a bit more entertaining or a bit more knowledge, uh, inducing than get caught up in this keeping up with the Joneses attitude.
But when we see these headlines and we hear the average, the average is not a typical number.
It could be pulled up by a small number of large accounts, half or below that average, and probably well below that average.
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