The Average Retirement Savings Figure Isn’t the Person Next Door

A perfectly correct number can still leave you with entirely the wrong impression.

A retirement savings figure appeared on my phone and, within seconds, I was behind.

Behind whom was less clear. An average, apparently. A confident man in excellent lighting had told me what people approaching retirement had saved, and I was supposed to compare myself with it. No invitation had arrived for this examination. The results were already making me uncomfortable.

I put the phone down. Then picked it up, because nothing encourages a sensible response to anxiety quite like asking the thing that caused it for more details.

The word doing the work was average.

We use it to mean ordinary. A typical person. Someone more or less like the person next door. In statistics it can mean the mean, which is a perfectly legitimate calculation with no obligation to resemble anybody you know.

Imagine ten accounts. Nine contain $50,000 each. One contains $1 million. The mean is $145,000. The median, the middle of the ordered balances, is $50,000. Both numbers are correct. Only one resembles what most people in that little group actually have.

That is an illustration, not a claim about today’s pension balances. But it explains how you can feel hopelessly below normal when the supposedly normal figure has been hauled upwards by somebody with a very different life.

Put a millionaire in a bus shelter and the average improves dramatically. The bus does not arrive any sooner.

The arithmetic isn’t dishonest. The impression can be. Especially when a number appears without the country, the age group, the kind of account or the people missing from the calculation. A pension account isn’t the whole of somebody’s retirement. A large balance doesn’t explain their costs. A small one doesn’t tell you what other income they have.

Yet there we are, comparing complete lives through the keyhole of a single number.

I don’t object to knowing things. I spent a working life in which checking a figure was generally preferable to confidently guessing it. What I object to is the little moral judgement smuggled in afterwards. Here is the average. Now decide what is wrong with you.

There may be something wrong with the comparison instead.

Later life brings enough private calculations without adding a public leaderboard. You work out whether to put the heating on. Whether the café stop belongs in the walk. Whether a repair can wait. These are practical questions, not character assessments.

The shame arrives when we mistake them for evidence that everyone else has somehow managed better.

I don’t know everyone else’s circumstances. Neither does the man on my phone. He does, however, have very good lighting. I suspect that helps with almost anything.

None of this makes a limited income unlimited. The supermarket will not accept statistical literacy in exchange for bread. Understanding the mean and the median won’t mend the boiler.

But it might remove one unnecessary weight: the belief that your ordinary life is a uniquely disappointing version of somebody else’s.

There are pleasures here that don’t need a brochure. A book from the library. Time beside the sea. Tea drunk before it goes cold because nobody has called a meeting. They don’t cancel the financial questions. They sit alongside them, stubbornly worth having.

I closed the app and went for a walk.

For a while I was below nobody’s average. I was simply out.

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Before you wander back into the ordinary noise of the day, do one small thing with this.

Not a grand reinvention. Not a ten-year vision board. Just a quiet refusal to drift.

Because later life has a habit of becoming whatever is left after everyone else has had their say: the pension provider, the calendar, the family WhatsApp, the old job still living rent-free in your head.

The danger is not that you fail to make a plan.

The danger is that you inherit one by default.

If this piece nudged something uncomfortable but useful, I’d start here:

The Second Act Playbook is for building the shape of the next chapter before life fills it in for you.

The Retirement Identity Check-In is for the quieter question underneath it all: who are you becoming when the old labels loosen?

One is Free the other isn’t I will leave it to you to have a look. Neither is about panic.

They are about not waking up five years from now with a tidy pension and a life that somehow forgot to include you.