5 Signs You re Actually Saving Too Much For Retirement (It’s a Problem)

5 signs you're actually saving too much for retirement. And it points at a problem almost nobody warns you about. Saving too much for retirement. Every money video pushes the same message. Save more, start earlier, you're behind. But past a specific line, every extra dollar stops buying safety and starts costing you the years you were saving for. Here are five signs you've crossed it. The first four are checkable math. The fifth is the reason the math gets ignored. Quick honesty check before the list. The average American household is undersaved, and if that's you, this video is not your problem yet. I made a video about the five signs you've saved enough and that test comes first. This one is for the people who passed it. The disciplined savers with the automatic transfers, the maxed accounts, and the spreadsheet they update on Sunday nights. Bill Perkins, a hedge fund manager who wrote a book called Die With Zero, has a blunt way of framing what those people risk. Money you never use is life you worked for and never got to live. The five signs are ahead of his math, plus what retirement researchers keep finding when they study careful savers. Sign one is hiding inside the retirement plan you already have. William Bengen's 4% rule says a portfolio worth 25 times your yearly spending can carry a 30-year retirement. Retirement researcher Michael Kitces tested that rule against history. Every 30-year retirement window since the 1870s, all 115 of them. In nine out of 10 of those windows, the retiree finished 30 years of spending with more money than they started with. The median ending balance was 2.8 times the starting amount. Follow the standard plan with $1 million and the most likely outcome is that you die holding around $2.8 million. And real retirees are even more careful than the rule assumes. The Employee Benefit Research Institute tracked actual households through their first 20 years of retirement. Among people who retired with $500,000 or more, the median household had spent just 11.8% of that money. 20 years in, almost 90% of the pile sat untouched. The institute's own research director looked at those numbers and called it being way too conservative. So run the check on yourself. Open your retirement projection and look at the ending balance, the number next to age 90. If even the middle scenario shows you dying with multiples of what you have today, you've already saved past the point the plan was built for and someone else will spend the difference. Keep that in mind as we go because sign five explains why almost nobody acts on it, even after seeing the math. First though, you need to know exactly where your own line is. Sign two draws it. Sign two comes straight out of Die With Zero and you can run it in 30 seconds at your kitchen table. Perkins calls it the survival threshold. Take what one year of your life costs, multiply it by the years you have left, then multiply by 0.7 because invested money keeps earning while you spend it down. Picture a saver named Maria. She's 55, spends $60,000 a year, and plans around living to 85. That's 30 years left times $60,000 times 0.7, which puts her survival floor at $1,260,000. Notice that this floor sits below the $1,500,000 that the 25 times rule from sign one would tell her to hold. The standard advice was already the cautious version. Everything above that floor has a different job. Perkins's whole argument is that it should be spent on living while you're still healthy enough to enjoy it. He adds a second test and this one stings a little. Your net worth should hit its highest point somewhere between age 45 and 60, then start falling on purpose as you trade money back for time and experiences. The peak is supposed to be a date on the calendar and almost every saver treats it like a number that should keep climbing forever. So look at your own net worth graph. If you're 58 and the line has never once bent downward, your plan is missing its entire second half. A formula can tell you when you can afford to spend. It can't tell you what the waiting costs. That's sign three. Sign three lives on your someday list. The trip to Japan with your kids, the Grand Canyon hike, the summer in a rented house near the ocean. Perkins's most useful idea is as experiences work like investments. A trip pays you once when you take it, then again every time you remember it, retell it at a dinner table, or scroll past the photos. He calls that the memory dividend. Think about the one story your family makes you retell every Thanksgiving. You paid for it once decades ago and it still pays you every single year. A trip taken at 40 keeps paying out for 40 more years. The same trip at 78 has fewer years left to pay out and usually less knee cartilage to enjoy it with. The data says the window closes earlier than most plans admit. David Blanchett, one of the most cited retirement researchers in the country, tracked what retirees really spend. It falls about 1% a year in real terms and a household that starts retirement spending $100,000 is down near $74,000 by age 84. The money didn't run out, the wanting did. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers trace the same curve. In 2023, the average household aged 65 to 74 spent $3,447 on entertainment. After 75, that number drops to $2,131. And the World Health Organization measured how long Americans live against how long we stay healthy. On average, we spend our last 12.4 years in a body that can no longer keep up. That 12.4 year gap is the widest of any country on earth and it means your money can outlast your health by more than a decade. So the sign three check is uncomfortable but simple. Anything on your list that needs your body, your kids under your roof, or another living person comes with a deadline. If you keep fully funding age 85 while quietly canceling this year's plans, that's the sign. By the way, if this is giving you a more useful way to look at your own numbers, make sure to like and subscribe. I put out new videos every week on building wealth, retiring well, and the money psychology that drives it all. All right, sign four is where the IRS joins the story. Sign four is the one your future tax return already knows about. Money inside a traditional 401k or IRA has never been taxed and the government does not wait forever. At age 73, required minimum distributions kick in and the IRS forces money out of the account whether you need it or not. The average 73-year-old's 401k holds around $430,000 and the first forced withdrawal on that balance runs about $16,000 taxed as ordinary income. Stack that on top of Social Security and dividends and the extra income can push you into a higher bracket and raise your Medicare premiums in the same year. After decades of disciplined deferring, over-saving hands you some of the largest tax bills of your life in your late 70s. And this sign reaches past you. If the plan is that your kids get whatever is left, look at when leftovers actually arrive. The average American inheritance is received at age 51. Back in 1989, it was 41 and it keeps drifting later as lifespans stretch. Only about 30% of Americans ever receive one at all. Perkins argues the useful window for giving your kids money is age 26 to 35 when it can pay for a first house, a career change, or fewer work hours while their own kids are small. At 55, the same money mostly tops up an account that was already fine. Waiting maximizes the amount, it ruins the timing. Put both halves together and sign four turns blunt. The IRS collects at 73, your kids collect in their 50s. The only person who never touches the money is the one who saved it. So if the math is this clear, why do careful, intelligent people keep sitting on money they will never use? That question is sign five. Sign five is the one a calculator can't catch because it lives in your head. A research team led by Scott Rick surveyed more than 13,000 people and sorted them by how spending feels. Tightwads, people who spend less than they themselves want to, outnumber spendthrifts three to two. For a tightwad, handing over money produces genuine discomfort. In one experiment, the exact same $5 charge was described two ways. Once as a $5 fee and once as a small $5 fee. That one word, small, made tightwads 20% more likely to pay it. The brain's wiring decides how the purchase feels, no matter what the bank balance says. Now add what we know about regret. Two Columbia Business School researchers, Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan, asked people to look back on choices between work and pleasure. When they judged last week's choices, people regretted the indulgence. When they judged choices from five or more years ago, the regret flipped. They regretted the overtime, the skipped vacations, the discipline. Guilt fades with time, missing out compounds. Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse who spent years caring for dying patients, recorded where that flip ends up. One of the most common regrets she heard, especially from men, was, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. The early retirement community has a name for the mild version, one more year syndrome. You reach your number and you stay because stopping feels reckless even when the spreadsheet says you're free. So test yourself honestly. Think of the last time you could afford something you had planned for, budgeted, and wanted, and still talked yourself out of it. If saying yes to your own money feels like a failure, you found sign five and probably the reason the other four exist. None of this is an argument against saving. The average household still needs more of it and the first four signs describe a problem plenty of Americans would love to have. But if your projection says you'll die at your richest, if you're past your survival threshold, if the someday list keeps growing while the window for it shrinks, and if spending money you plan to spend still feels like losing, then saving is a skill you've already mastered. The one you never practiced is spending on purpose. So run the 0.7 formula this weekend. Multiply one year of spending by the years you're planning for, then by 0.7. If you clear that line, take one item off the someday list and put a real date on it this month at whatever price lets you sleep at night. And if this video gave you a clearer way to find your own line, hit like, subscribe, and share it with the person in your life who has earned the right to slow down and hasn't. Tell me in the comments which of the five signs showed up in your numbers. Before you go, here's one last question. If the saving part of your life were officially finished today, what's the first thing you would stop postponing?