There’s a lot of detail behind “expect to be” that matters here. It comes down to “when is the optimal time to spend this money”—with decent investment options, if your satisfactory lifestyle has unspent income, the answer is likely to be “later”. And then the next question is “how much notice will I have when it’s time to spend it all”?
For most retirement savings, the tax and match options are enough to push some amount of your savings into that medium. And it’s not really locked up—early withdrawal carries penalties, generally not much worse than not getting the advantages in the first place.
And if you’re liquidating because you think money is soon to be meaningless (for you, or generally), you can also borrow a lot, probably more than you could if you didn’t have long-term assets to point to.
For me, the EV calculation comes out in favor of retirement savings. I’m likely closer to it than you, but even so, the range of outcomes includes all of “unexpected death/singularity making savings irrelevant”, “early liquidation for a pre-retirement use”, and “actual retirement usage”. And all of that outweighs by a fair bit “marginal spending today”.
Fundamentally, the question isn’t “should I use investment vehicles targeted for retirement”, but “What else am I going to do with the money that’s higher-value for my range of projected future experiences”?
Very good point that I may not be doing much else with the money. I’m still saving it, just in more liquid, easy to access forms (e.g. stocks, crypto.) I’m thinking it might come in handy sometime in the next 20 years during some sort of emergency or crunch time, or to handle unforeseen family expenses or something, or to donate to a good cause.
There’s a lot of detail behind “expect to be” that matters here. It comes down to “when is the optimal time to spend this money”—with decent investment options, if your satisfactory lifestyle has unspent income, the answer is likely to be “later”. And then the next question is “how much notice will I have when it’s time to spend it all”?
For most retirement savings, the tax and match options are enough to push some amount of your savings into that medium. And it’s not really locked up—early withdrawal carries penalties, generally not much worse than not getting the advantages in the first place.
And if you’re liquidating because you think money is soon to be meaningless (for you, or generally), you can also borrow a lot, probably more than you could if you didn’t have long-term assets to point to.
For me, the EV calculation comes out in favor of retirement savings. I’m likely closer to it than you, but even so, the range of outcomes includes all of “unexpected death/singularity making savings irrelevant”, “early liquidation for a pre-retirement use”, and “actual retirement usage”. And all of that outweighs by a fair bit “marginal spending today”.
Fundamentally, the question isn’t “should I use investment vehicles targeted for retirement”, but “What else am I going to do with the money that’s higher-value for my range of projected future experiences”?
Very good point that I may not be doing much else with the money. I’m still saving it, just in more liquid, easy to access forms (e.g. stocks, crypto.) I’m thinking it might come in handy sometime in the next 20 years during some sort of emergency or crunch time, or to handle unforeseen family expenses or something, or to donate to a good cause.