“My wife and I are 40 and 41 and make roughly $272,000 per year combined. Between our various retirement accounts we have around a million dollars saved,” a user shared in a recent post to the subreddit r/PersonalFinance. “We’re considering pausing our Roth contributions until we’re empty nesters. This would let us travel quite a bit more with our kids while they still live with us.”
This is not a bad problem to have — in fact, it’s great to be so ahead on saving for retirement that you can wonder whether it’s appropriate to spend more maximizing prime years with your family.
The post goes on to explain the couple is contributing $16,200 annually to a Roth 401(k), which could be paused to spend more freely on travel. Specifically, the user asks about foregoing this contribution until their kids, who are now around 10 years old, move out and go to college. The couple says they would like to retire in their mid-60s.
Does this move make sense?
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Expert advice: There’s a risk of saving too much for retirement
We asked Rachel Lawrence, head of advice and planning at Monarch, a popular budgeting app, how she’d advise this couple.
“The crux is actually understanding how much you need, so how much you’re spending now and how much you might be spending in retirement,” says Lawrence, who’s also a certified financial planner. “They can have $1 million, but we all know $1 million isn’t worth what it used to be worth.”
A commonly cited rule of thumb recommends that by age 40, you ideally have three times your salary saved. In the couple’s case, they have closer to four times their income saved. However, Lawrence says she wouldn’t pay much attention to these “generic” rules, as individual circumstances vary so much.
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The Reddit post states that they would like “75-80% of pre-retirement income in retirement,” which implies relatively high retirement spending given their income level. Still, the figures shared in the post suggest the family can likely afford to vacation. The question will just be how much.
The family needs to decide how important travel is to them, which will require weighing some core values, Lawrence says. Sticking to a travel budget is also key, considering that regular trips as a family of four can add up fast, potentially derailing a savings plan.
While some experts and communities believe in saving as aggressively as possible for retirement to pursue financial independence above all else, that’s not necessarily the correct path for every saver.
“It doesn’t sound like that’s them, right?” Lawrence says, explaining it’s normal to have other priorities. “It sounds like they would rather delay financial independence because they value more highly this sense of adventure or quality time with kids.”
