Retirement Confidence Is Dwindling

Retirement confidence is shrinking for millions of Americans — even for people who have spent decades saving and investing responsibly.

In this episode of MasterPlan, we explore why so many people approaching retirement still feel anxious about the future, even after building substantial nest eggs.

Because retirement fear usually isn’t just about numbers.
It’s about uncertainty.

Inflation, market volatility, healthcare costs, taxes, longevity, Social Security concerns, and the fear of outliving your money have created a level of financial anxiety many retirees have never experienced before. And for a lot of people, simply “having investments” does not automatically create confidence.

We talk through why retirement planning is as much psychological as it is financial — and why clarity, guaranteed income, liquidity, and having an actual written plan can dramatically change the way people experience retirement.

We walk through:

0:00 — Is Your Retirement Confidence Dwindling?
0:30 — Why Americans Are More Financially Anxious Than Ever
1:30 — Fear, Market Volatility, and Emotional Investing
3:00 — Why a Bigger Nest Egg Doesn’t Always Create Peace of Mind
4:30 — The Difference Between Wealth and Retirement Confidence
5:00 — Guaranteed Income and the “Income Gap”
7:00 — The Psychological Shift From Saving to Spending
8:00 — Why Retirement Planning Must Stay Flexible
9:30 — Liquidity, Cash Reserves, and Market Downturns
11:00 — Avoiding Permanent Losses During Volatile Markets
12:00 — Building Multiple “Buckets” for Different Needs
13:00 — Why Facing Financial Fear Creates Confidence
15:00 — The Importance of a Written Retirement Income Plan
16:00 — Clarity, Purpose, and the Non-Financial Side of Retirement

Visit masterplanretire.com to access our retirement checklists, podcasts, and schedule a complimentary consultation.
Call 770-980-9262 to speak directly with someone about your retirement planning needs.

https://masterplanretire.com/

Catch all episodes of our podcast at https://www.masterplanyourretirement.com/resources/episodes

Listen to Mark Fricks on Saturdays at 12:00 p.m. on XTRA 106.3 FM WFOM.
Sign up for one of our upcoming events at https://www.masterplanyourretirement.com/events

Purchase Mark’s book, The Road Less Traveled: Turning Your Retirement Worries Into an Excursion of a Lifetime, on Amazon: https://a.co/d/4fx94Al

Advisory services offered through MasterPlan Retirement Consultants, Inc., a Registered Investment Advisor in the state of Georgia. Insurance, tax and commodities services offered through Fricks and Associates, Inc. dba MasterPlan Retirement Consultants. The aforementioned are affiliated companies.

Transcript

Why Retirement Fear Keeps Rising

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Is your retirement confidence dwindling? Hey folks, welcome back. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to Master Plan Retirement Consultants Retirement Roadmap. My name is Evan. With me as always, retirement planner Mark Fricks. Americans are worried about the future. Inflation, market swings, the rising cost of health care, the long-term fate of Social Security. The list of things keeping people up at night seems only to grow. Mark, I want to to share a couple of um of numbers here. A new Allianz Life study found that 67% of Americans worry more about running out of money than about death.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Or public speaking. Or public speaking, yeah. They didn't they didn't ask that question. That's the number one, actually, I think. But yeah, hey, two-thirds of Americans. I can I I get it, because so many people are so far behind. We have people come to see us. And uh many people have done a great job. Other people are are behind. How do we catch up? And you know, if you don't have a plan to catch up, if you're not working on it, fear goes up that that much higher.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

100%. In fact, nearly half don't have a written financial plan. 57% feel anxious when markets drop, and shockingly, 34% say they pull money out of investments during downturns.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

I would have thought it had been more. You know? Based on people I talk to, and and uh, you know, there's a uh a company called Dow Bar Research and they research investor behavior. And what they have found is that the average investor that does some of their own trading, I don't mean every day necessarily, I mean uh if the market reacts, they go in and start buying and selling. The average equity investor makes 1.9% because they zoom when they should zag and zag when they should zoom. Or in other words, the two uh emotions I mentioned, fear and greed. They get fearful, they sell. That's usually after the market has dropped. Yeah. They get greedy when things are going up. Right now, people are buying gold. Our clients, we've been buying gold for five or six years, but now it's up pretty high. Do we buy it today?

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Is it going to keep going up? I mean, it's anyway. When, how, all that kind of good stuff. So uh I I would think it would be higher, but still that's that's a pretty big number.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Well, the good news is folks have the power to change that. Not only their confidence, but the power to build resources to prepare them for retirement. But we know it all comes down to a plan to begin with. Um but something I want to to share quite at the top, and we and we've we've spoken on this before, um, but a big thing to remember is it's not the

The Myth Of A Magic Nest Egg

SPEAKER_00 3:00

size of the nest egg. According to Northwestern Mutuals 2026 planning and progress study, Americans believe they need 1.46 million to retire comfortably. Um so we've we we've had a lot of back and forth on why it's really hard to pinpoint a number. There's no blanket number for everyone. We've seen people with a couple hundred thousand versus a couple hundred million and both retire comfortably comfortably because there's so many outside factors to consider. But hitting that number that you've projected your for yourself does not necessarily mean peace of mind. Right.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

Um like you said, we've got people that have five and ten million and fifty million or whatever, and they worry about running out of money. Um and I think the more money you have, maybe the more worries you have. Now, I'm not talking about the the billionaires of the world necessarily, but but people that have worked hard and successful. Um and part of that comes from the fact that they're probably living beyond their means. Um, you know, they may may make $500,000 a year, they're probably spending $500,000 a year. So if they lose their job and they're out of work six months to twelve months, yeah, they're underwater. I mean, they they're they're done for a while, right? So uh it is a lot about uh the the spending part of it, but you know, like that $1.4 million number you threw out, that you I've said this before. I mean, if you listen to our episodes, that's ridiculous. It it has nothing to do with some kind of a magic number out there. It needs to be part of a plan and determining how much you need and then how do you best um most efficiently use that money.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Well, there are a few steps to building retirement confidence. Some are financial, of course, um, but a lot of them are psychological as well. I want to start

Guaranteed Income And The Income Gap

SPEAKER_00 4:45

walking through some of theirs and some of those steps. And the first is one word, guaranteed. You know, we've got social security, we've got pensions, even some annuities can help cover essential income needs regardless of market fluctuations.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Yeah, as you know, the first thing we look at is an income plan for clients. Never had a client come in with an income plan looking 35 years into the future. But when you look at that income plan, you plug in those guaranteed income streams, whether it be like you said, social security, pensions, annuities, or whatever, um, versus what you need. That's the income gap. We talk about that a lot. That's that red number. Okay. And so how do we plug that income gap in? And then uh we don't want to plug it with markets that do two things very well. They go up and they go down. And so if they're up, everything's hunky-dory. My next check coming from Schwab or Fidelity is going to be covered because the market's up, but then the next month the market drops, worry sets in. And so that's step one to giving confidence, doing away with the fear of income. You know, regardless of what happens anywhere else, if that income's guaranteed coming in, a lot of those worries go away.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

Yeah, well when exactly. When clients know the essentials are covered for life, uh, the anxiety drops dramatically, and the psychological effect of guaranteed income may be bigger than the dollars even suggest.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Right, right. Oh, and you you mentioned it's not the size of the nest, it's how much income it can produce. And so that's uh that's the transition from working and saving into retirement, replacing that paycheck, walking away from that guarantee or mostly guaranteed paycheck, right? Um, into this world of, okay, I've got a bucket of money, how do I get it out efficiently, regardless of what of what's happening in the economy? And so again, that it just gives such peace of mind. We uh usually between the second and fourth meeting with our clients when we're going through phase one, which is the actual planning period when we write the retirement roadmap or blueprint, um, they tell us, I get it, and now I I feel so much better because I know that electric bills paid for, I know that mortgage is paid for, I know that I got food on the table. Um now the rest of our money we can certainly make it more efficient and use it for other purposes like health care, long-term care. Long-term growth, period. That could be ten different things. For many different things. Um but first securing that income. Um, and I love it when we we show them their income gap, and then the next meeting they come back and that red is gone. It's all black. They just, I mean, you could just see the anxiety roll off their faces.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

Well, you know, one of the hardest transitions in retirement is behavioral. Uh people are conditioned through decades of employment to rely on that paycheck uh while their savings kind of grow in the background. The retirement dynamic flips that completely. And now we're no longer in accumulation mode. Now, hopefully we're still getting some long-term growth. However, now we're in the deacumulation growth. We're taking all that money that we've saved, and now we're figuring out, okay, how to make this one big bucket do all these different jobs that we need, guaranteed income being one of them, because we need to know where our paycheck is coming from. We need that in place.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Yep. And then you have other things that can cause a gap. So let's say you have a great plan, we have filled that gap, a spouse dies, what goes away? Yeah. The smaller Social Security payment. How do you replace that? There better be a plan in place, right? Um so these plans, these income plans, are not set in stone. They are very changeable uh based on many things. Changes in life, like we just mentioned, maybe more income needed because of long-term care needs or home health care needs. Um perhaps uh inflation is outpacing social. Well, it always outpaces Social Security, but um so so life changes, but also changes in tax law, changes in Social Security payments, which may be coming, it's not going away, but the payments, some of the rules may change, that could change a little bit as well. So there's always some backup strategies that we have, and that we we kind of show the clients, and that's where it becomes really fun for me and you, and very interesting uh as we start looking at these various scenarios, what can go wrong? We've talked about this numerous times. There are 15, I've come up with 15 areas that could cause a change in your retirement income. And so not all of them apply to everybody, but the ones that do apply for that client, we need to take a look at and make sure that we have a strategy for that particular problem.

Liquidity That Prevents Selling Low

SPEAKER_00 9:25

That's right. Uh another step to instilling retirement confidence and building that up is liquidity. And what do I mean by that? I don't just mean access to funds. Like that that's a very simple concept. However, what I mean is cash reserves, protected growth for those market downturns, so you're not beholden to the fluctuations of the market.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Yes, some of that money needs to be a principal protected so that, like you said, if uh if I need a new roof and you know my uh my IRA accounts down 15 percent, do I want to take another $20,000 out of that? Probably not. I would not advise that. But some of that money is segmented off to be protected, but still grow. Okay, I'm not I'm not gonna stick it in a bank because a bank, you lose money. Purchasing power, right? Banks pay zero to two or three percent. Maybe you get a high yield savings at four and a half, four, maybe. Um inflation has been running higher than that. So on average, you're not gonna keep up with inflation that way. Uh so some of that money principle protected, but it still grows five to eight percent. Um uh less liquid, but then we have other liquid buckets, different um types of growth buckets that may grow differently in different markets, some conservative, some moderate, or whatever it may be, but those are liquid. Yeah. And so that's you know, sometimes when I say liquid, I I kind of add a statement to that. I say liquid does not necessarily mean it's in the bank. Right. It's there are other areas to keep liquid money because if you keep all your liquidity in the bank, uh a half, a third, a ten percent of your money, whatever, is not going to grow.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Right. I mean, when the market drops a client with protected reserves, they don't need to sell at a loss. I mean, they can wait it out. That's what separates a temporary decline from a permanent loss of capital. And that's also why we like to have multiple options. Um, and it's not just a which one is up or which one is up the the most. Which one is uh, you know, what what are we using this for? Can we take it from this, or do we want to let that continue to cook and marinate while we pull from something over here? Uh we we want the options, we want the liquidity, we want included with market growth and protected growth throughout.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Yeah, it's very interesting. I love sitting down with clients in reviews and we look at their portfolios, and our average client has anywhere from three to six portfolios, I would say, as far as market portfolios. Okay, there's other buckets for other things. But just for the growth side, and we sit down and do the reviews, and our reports will tell us not only what has it averaged since we opened it three years ago or five years ago, but it will give us a year to date. So right now we're doing reviews and we're four four months into the year. I've got some portfolios that are up four, five, six percent. We have one or two that are up twenty percent for four months, okay? And uh they just made the right moves based on things happening in the Middle East and and other things like that. They make quick moves uh to react uh to world events and and the economy. Um so we look at that and say, hey, if this is up twenty percent, we can certainly afford to take some of those profits and put this roof on, or whatever it may be. So that's why I love the different portfolios. They each grow differently. Next year, that portfolio may only be up one percent, but these other two are up ten percent for the first quarter or something. So uh different flavors. I tell my clients, you know, I'm not just a uh a vanilla guy. I want some chocolate, some butter pecans, some pistachio or whatever, because they're all are different

A Simple Way To Face The Numbers

SPEAKER_01 12:45

in uh whether it be the season or or the moon I'm in, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Yeah, sure. I do want to take a moment um to point you to our website, masterplanretire.com. There you can schedule your complimentary consultation. That's an opportunity to discuss your retirement, your retirement uh hopes and dreams and fears like we're discussing today, um, your doubts. We'll run a series of reports, help you get organized, give you a 10,000-foot view of your own retirement. Feel free to contact us. We would love to hear from you. That's masterplanretired.com or call us at the office 770-980-9262.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Quick little remark on those reports. This is your opportunity to face your fears. If you don't know what the problems are, and you just you just have all these fears in your mind about money and retirement, if we could put the numbers on the paper and say, we have a we have a right to be afraid of this particular scenario. Now let's have a plan for it. Let's take care of it, and it does away with the fears. So this will illuminate those problem areas which we can now face and solve those problems which solved the fears.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Well, I had a quote that I was going to share at the end, but since you brought up facing your fears, I'll share it now. Um Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived through her own share of national anxiety as first lady during the Great Depression and World War II, she had a piece of advice that she offered that still applies. Um her quote is you gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. And that is the first step with all of our clients who walk in, all the prospects who uh first step into the retirement planning process, the very first thing is to look the situation in the face because, like Mark said, you don't know where you can be if you don't know where you are now and what you need to do to get there.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

As we've said before, it's very much like going to a doctor. Uh we're afraid to go to the doctor because we may get some bad news. Oh yeah. Right? But if you don't face that bad news and get that problem uh on the course of correction, the longer you wait, just like in finance, the deeper the problem gets and it may be unsolvable. So if I, you know, if I don't go to the doctor and get checked out and maybe I've got cancer or something going on, and I just say I'm not going to the doctor and then I'm dead in three years because I did not if I had taken care of it in the very beginning, my chances were so much higher of surviving and living a long life. Very same thing from a financial standpoint.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Well, and that's the the old saying, when's the best time to plant a shade tree? Ten, twenty years. That's true. That's the second best time. Well, right now.

Written Plans Beat Rules Of Thumb

SPEAKER_00 15:20

So another point to instilling retirement confidence, have a written income plan. We've been talking about income plans. We've been talking about making sure that you have that comprehensive retirement plan, but it really is as simple as making sure it is a written plan. Knowing you have the money is one thing. Knowing exactly how you're going to spend it and how you'll adjust if conditions change is a whole nother thing. Our income plans that we create for our clients, they last for their entire life. And they are also adjustable because we know that life fluctuates.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

And I know some of you out there, you're thinking to yourself, especially if you're kind of an engineering uh figures kind of person, right? Uh you you've probably put down some numbers. You probably have a spreadsheet. We have clients that come in here with their self-developed spreadsheets. Then we come back in and we show them things they didn't think about. Um I had one person come in, they did not include inflation. Do you need more money every year? Yes, you do. But they didn't include what happens if this happens, what happens if that happens. So, you know, bring your spreadsheet with you, and we will look at those numbers, put them into a format that will illustrate what we're talking about here. And and so the few income plans that I have seen uh or really not income plans, they're more just some numbers down. Hey, here's the flow, here's how it's looking, um, things of that nature. But it's let us look at it. Let it's kind of like googling, again, I hate getting you back to medical, but Googling a medical problem. You may find that some information, but go to the doctor and say, this is what I've been finding. What do you think? They're going to give you a much deeper view, much more uh educated look at it.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Well, and a lot of people, even if they haven't written something out, they think that they have an income plan. Well, I have a 401k and a pension. I've heard of the 4% rule, so as long as I follow that, you know, it's you know, an income plan is not a rule of thumb. It's knowing where your sources of income are coming from, knowing where those gaps are, keep, like Mark said, making sure that you are uh making room and flexibility for fluctuations in life, fluctuations of cost of living, tax increases, passing of a spouse or potential income source, uh new roof, new porch, whatever you name it, um, that has to be a flexible document.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

Well just think about the last five or six years. Um, you know, going to the grocery store. Uh I'd come out for $100 with six bags of groceries, and that's three bags. Yeah. That's not going to go back. The inflation, you know, they say, well, inflation is down to three percent. Yeah, but we're not gonna go a negative three percent in most cases and go back to where we were. So that three percent, those grocery prices, with some exceptions, you know, eggs were came down after a scare, after the bird flew, and these things like that. But basically speaking, and gas is fluctuating, but most items, once they go up, even if they pull back a little bit, they're not going back to what they were four or five years ago. Try building a house right now. If you've looked at things, whether it's repairing a house, heating an air system, building lumber, all that stuff. Back when it went up during COVID, it's come down some, but it's nowhere near where it was before COVID. Yeah. Pretty much like everything else. So that's just one item that you need to think about. And that's why when we write a report, we don't use 3.2 percent that the government advertises as our long-term inflation rate. We use four because the government leaves a lot of things on their numbers, and I'd rather be a little bit too high than a little bit too low.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

Well, you know, I don't want to spout too many numbers, but we've seen this firsthand. You know, Americans with a financial plan in place, speaking of that peace of mind, Americans with a financial plan in place are more than twice as likely as their peers to feel confident about their retirement prospects. And the numbers from this fidelity survey was 83% compared to 38% on retirement confidence of those who have a written plan. And that's something that, you know, we've we use that to share our company philosophy and to let people know kind of where we're coming from that we work with you to develop that peace of mind. But the reason we use the term peace of mind is because we hear that, that is the term we hear the most from people in their, you know, in their initial consultations, things like that. You know, what are you looking for in retirement planning? It's it's peace of mind. I don't want to be worried walking into retirement, and that's the biggest thing. It's all psychological. Um,

Clarity Beyond Money Purpose And Health

SPEAKER_00 19:35

which brings us to our final step in instilling retirement confidence, and that it's it is more than just numbers. Some of the biggest factors in retirement aren't financial. Um I have a um a quote here from Amy Mullen, who's a CFP, she's the president of Money Quotient. Uh she suggests that low confidence is often misdiagnosed as a planning problem. Even the most well-crafted financial plan can't fully resolve uncertainty or fear. When confidence is low, the issue usually isn't a lack of strategy, but a lack of clarity around what truly matters and what the plan is meant to support. That is what we've talked about in other episodes as well. What are you actually working towards your retirement for? What is that income plan there to support? Is it your family? Is it to see grandkids? Is it to travel? What is your purpose? Even deeper, what is your purpose in when you're stepping into retirement? You gotta know that about yourself. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Our first appointment with clients, our first conversations, uh conversation is what are your fears, what are your goals, how do you feel about money? How do you feel what about family? What how do you how are you gonna spend your time in retirement? That all relates directly to the money they're gonna need and the situations that they may face. Um even when we have family meetings, when the kids come in and we're all involved, and it kind of uh once a plan's done, hey, so this is what's going on, this is who the beneficiaries are, this is why they're spreading money out over years, whatever it may be. Um, but it but it it just um it it it is, I think, more psychological than anything else. So my next book, if I ever get around to to finishing it, I've started it, is that transition from pre-retirement into retirement. Because we've seen four or five hundred people go through that, right? And we've got, I don't know how many clients are approaching that time. And so we have these discussions and we stuck we we triple up our meetings when they're approaching that retirement date, you know, the year before, six months before, and then afterwards, just talking about, you know, what are your feelings, what's going on, how's your income, what's uh what are your plans of the first six months, the first year. We just go into that. Uh my meeting, I just finished up with a client a few minutes ago. They uh he retired about a year ago, and his health is deteriorating because he is not doing anything. He retired. And she said basically he sits on the sofa and watches TV. And she can see the health issues already cropping up. And so her, her son, they're all trying to get him up and out and and doing things. But once you get in that rut, it's hard to climb out of it, too. And so you you you gotta have a plan about what you're gonna be doing as well. That's an important part of the plan.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Yeah, so that final step being clarity. Um and just like financially, uh having a written structured plan, those guarantees built in, knowing the clarity of your plan, having it written out, it's also the same for the non-financial as for the psychological. Clarity comes from the non-financial side being purpose, health, relationships. You know what it is for you, but those are three of the big ones.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Yep, absolutely. And and uh whether whether that's being engaged with the you know community, uh family, uh a part-time job that you've always thought would be fun to do. I mean, I could go on and on. We talk about this with our clients all the time. Um pickleball, you know, whatever it may be. But but really just getting up off that sofa, engaging mind and body, both need to be engaged with a purpose. And that purpose may be passing on your knowledge to your kids and grandkids. Uh volunteering so we're yeah, it doesn't have to be some big grand, you know, scheme that you want to change the world, which will be fine, by the way, but just uh purpose that you're striving toward additional goals because your life doesn't end at retirement. It it's you've got a ways to go, and there's a lot of a lot of things you can offer a people, family, things of that nature.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Yeah, and that takes more time as well. You know, we can we can sit down and create a financial plan and we can make it as fish as efficient as we want and and really put in all the hours and and put in a leather-bound tome and all this, you know, whatever. Um but it really takes self-reflection to know what your purpose is. I mean, frankly, um uh it's really easy for us in our working years to build our purpose around our job if we're not careful. Um, and then especially if you're transitioning from a

Plan Well And Prosper

SPEAKER_00 24:05

career into retirement, if you've built all your purpose on something like that, you've you've got a little bit more self-reflection to do. But the psychological aspect of things for health, relationships, purpose, um, they're crucial. And there are some past episodes we can talk about, but we are out of time.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Totally out of time. So until we see you again, remember, plan well and prosper. Take care.