What Happens When You and Your Spouse Don’t Agree on When to Retire?
You’ve probably pictured retirement more than once. The freedom. The travel. Maybe more time with grandchildren, or finally starting that side project.
But have you pictured it with your spouse — out loud, in detail? For a lot of couples, the honest answer is no.
According to Fidelity’s 2024 Couples & Money Study, 53% of not-yet-retired couples say they have conflicting views on how much they’ll need saved to retire. And while most partners expect to retire around the same age, expecting the same age isn’t the same as agreeing on it, or on what the years after look like.
It’s Rarely About the Math
When couples disagree about retirement, it’s tempting to assume the disagreement is about the number in the account. Sometimes it is. More often, it’s about two different pictures of daily life that were never compared side by side.
One of you may be counting down the days. The other may not be ready to leave the identity or purpose that work provides. One of you may be picturing frequent travel. The other may be picturing staying close to home, near family, in a familiar routine.
Neither picture is wrong. But if they’ve never been said out loud, they can’t be planned for, either.
Three Questions Worth Asking Each Other This Week
These are the kinds of questions we ask clients in our own conversations. They don’t require a spreadsheet, just some time together.
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- If we each retired on our own timeline, what would a normal Tuesday look like for each of us?
- What have we been assuming about the other person’s plans that we’ve actually never confirmed out loud?
- What would need to be true, financially, for either of us to retire earlier than we’ve been planning?
None of these questions have a right answer. What matters is that you’re both answering the same question, together.
Why This Belongs With Your Financial Plan, Not Just Your Kitchen Table
Conversations like these are easy to keep having informally, over years, without ever landing on a shared answer. That’s exactly where a financial plan should help; not just by running the numbers on a given retirement date, but by giving you a structured way to work through what you actually want that date to look like, together.
That’s a lot of what our Family Office Services are built around: conversations that go beyond a portfolio review, and a retirement planning process that starts with what you both want, not just when you can afford it.
If this sounds like a conversation you and your spouse have been circling without quite landing, we’d be glad to help you have it.
