What enough looks like

A pension statement says what you have. It says nothing about what a year of your retirement will cost, and that is the figure a plan turns on. Spending moves a plan more than almost anything else you enter, and it is the figure fewest people can name.

Several bodies have tried to fill that gap by pricing a retirement in the round. Instead of asking how much a person has, they ask what a life costs: the food, the heating, the car, the holidays, the presents, the haircuts. The answer is a standard, a figure for a year that stands for a way of living.

A standard is useful for the same reason a map is. It shows where your own figure sits against something other people have priced, so a guess can be checked against a measured basket. It is useful without being yours. Nobody’s retirement is the average one.

The topics that follow say how the standards most often quoted were built, what other measures exist, what every one of them leaves out, and how ‘Is this enough?’ sets your plan beside them.