By Dejan Ilijevski, MBA, MS — SCM Investment Services
There is a number that has been climbing for four years, and it has nothing to do with the stock market.
In 2022, 57% of Americans said they feared running out of money more than they feared dying. In a widely cited 2026 retirement study, that figure reached 67% — roughly two out of every three of us. Among Gen X, who can now see retirement on the horizon, it tends to run higher still.
The fear is rational — that part is real
I want to take that fear seriously, because it is reasonable. The personal savings rate has fallen to its lowest level since 2022, with many households dipping into accounts they had earmarked for retirement just to cover ordinary bills. Prices people remember from a few years ago are gone. The widely reported “magic number” for a comfortable retirement recently jumped to around $1.46 million (a survey-based national average, not a target for any individual) — a figure that, for most working families, lands somewhere between daunting and absurd.
So the fear makes sense. What I want to question is what people do with it. When we are afraid of running out, we tend to reach for three responses, and all three tend to make the fear worse:
- We chase a bigger number — treating retirement as a finish line we can never quite reach.
- We save more frantically — often without any sense of whether it is enough.
- Or we freeze — avoiding the statements, the plan, the conversation entirely, because looking feels worse than not knowing.
That last reflex — turning an emotion into a portfolio decision at the worst possible moment — is one I have written about before, in The Most Expensive Button on Your Brokerage Account. There the trigger was a falling market. Here it is a feeling about the future. The mechanism is the same.
The number is not the disease
Here is the detail that convinced me the fear is not really about the size of the portfolio.
The people who have actually saved well are often just as afraid. A growing body of research finds that a meaningful share of retirees — roughly a third in recent surveys — cannot bring themselves to spend the money they spent decades accumulating. They reach retirement with enough, and they still ration. They keep the thermostat low and skip the trip, not because the math says they must, but because spending the balance down feels like stepping off a ledge. One analysis this year described “underspending” as a genuine retirement risk, not a virtue.
Sit with that for a moment. If the fear of running out simply scaled with how much you had, the people with the most would feel the safest. They often don’t. Which means a bigger number is not the cure. The number is not the disease.
The fear is about income, not size
The fear is about income certainty, not portfolio size — and that reframes the entire question.
“Do I have enough?” is, for most people, unanswerable. Enough for what, for how long, against what costs, in what market? The question has no floor, so the anxiety has no ceiling. But “What will my income be, where will it come from, and how does it hold up if markets fall or I live to 95?” — that question has answers. You can model it. You can stress-test it. You can watch it survive a bad decade on paper before you ever have to live one.
What actually quiets it
This is why a reliable income floor tends to calm people in a way that another zero on the account balance never does. For most households that floor starts with Social Security, sometimes a pension, and a thoughtfully structured portfolio designed to produce income, not just a balance. For some people, an additional guaranteed-income tool can be appropriate — but that is a decision to make carefully, with the costs and trade-offs fully on the table, not a product to buy because a commercial sold you on the fear. The point isn’t the instrument. The point is knowing the floor exists, and knowing roughly where it sits.
And it starts with something almost embarrassingly simple: a written plan. In that same 2026 study, nearly half of Americans reported having no written financial plan at all. People with a plan tend to report meaningfully lower anxiety — not because the plan guarantees an outcome (nothing does), but because it replaces a bottomless question with a structured one.
I won’t pretend a plan makes the fear vanish. Markets will still fall. Costs will still rise. But fear responds to structure. The antidote to “I don’t know if I’ll be okay” is not a larger pile of money you’re still afraid to touch. It’s a clear picture of the income that pile produces, tested against the bad years, written down where you can see it.
If you’ve been carrying that two-out-of-three feeling, you are in very ordinary company. But the way out isn’t to save harder against a number that keeps moving. It’s to stop asking whether you have enough, and start asking what your money will actually pay you — and whether that holds up when things go wrong.
That’s a question with an answer. And the answer is usually calmer than the fear.
A Note on the Figures
The 57% and 67% figures compare two readings of the same widely cited annual retirement study (the Allianz Center for the Future of Retirement), measuring the share of surveyed Americans who report fearing running out of money more than death. Survey-based measures of sentiment are self-reported and reflect how respondents feel at a point in time; they are not forecasts of any individual’s outcome. The roughly one-third figure for retirees reluctant to spend down savings is drawn from separate contemporaneous reporting and research on retirement “underspending.” Individual circumstances vary widely, and none of the figures here should be read as a target or a prediction for any particular household.
Sources: Allianz Center for the Future of Retirement, 2026 Annual Retirement Study; contemporaneous reporting on U.S. personal savings rates and retirement spending behavior (CNBC and others).
Investment advisory services offered through SCM Investment Services, a Registered Investment Adviser. This material is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as investment, legal, or tax advice. All investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Any examples are for illustrative purposes only and do not represent any actual investment. Different assumptions or dates would produce different results. Please consult a qualified professional before making investment decisions. For SCM Investment Services’ full firm disclosures, please see our disclaimer page. Form ADV Part 2A is available upon request and at scminvesting.com.
