Are we saving too much for retirement? Can we even be saving too much for retirement? The usual rule of thumb, “Save 20% of your income for retirement” tends to result in saving too little for retirement (relative to our spending before retirement). Modified rules like “Save 33% of you income for retirement” or “Save $100,000 by the time you are 30” end up sacrificing too much of our spending in the early years of our career in favour of retirement spending.

It is actually not that hard to save enough for retirement while spending enough during our working years. But we tend to overdo savings because of psychological reasons, trying to control what we can in an uncertain world. Or through poor investment actions, either by choosing poor investments, and having poor investment behaviours. So, the answer we find is really that we are saving sub-optimally for