1 week ago
7
Opinion
February 14, 2026 — 5:01am
I asked a simple question in my Epic Retirement Facebook club last week: What are you most afraid of as you head towards retirement? The responses came flooding in, and what struck me wasn’t the fear itself. It was how consistent the answers were.
“Running out of money.” “Dying at my desk”, “Changing a lifetime of saving to spending”, “Boredom, identity and loss of purpose”, “Centrelink and the government changing the rules on super”, “Being alone”.
These aren’t irrational anxieties. They’re sensible questions asked by people who don’t want to sleepwalk into a phase of life that deserves more care and attention than that.
Dismissing them as benign helps no one. What does help is turning these vague fears into something they can measure and manage. Fear thrives on ambiguity. Give it structure, numbers and a plan, and it tends to shrink to a far more workable size or even get out of the way.
1. “What if I run out of money?”
This was by far the most common response. People were blunt: “Running out of money”, “Not having enough to live on”, “That I can’t afford my living expenses”.
One person wrote, “Not owning my own home and using retirement income on $700 a week rent.” Another said, “It’s being able to survive and not ending up homeless.”
There’s nothing abstract about that.
The mistake people make is jumping straight to the question of how much they need to retire, as if there’s a single magic number that guarantees safety. There isn’t. People don’t run out of money because they missed a headline figure. They run out of money when spending and income drift apart for long enough.
The most useful place to start is far more practical: work out what it actually costs you to live an ordinary year of your life. Not your best year and definitely not your worst year. Just the year you actually live at a comfortable pace of spending and level of income.
After money, the next fear wasn’t financial at all. It was about time.
Once you know that number, the fear becomes more specific and therefore more manageable. You can start asking sensible questions: “What income covers this now? What changes later? If something goes wrong – markets fall, work dries up, health intervenes – what could I adjust?”
For renters, this fear is particularly valid. Housing is the biggest financial risk in retirement. Which is why decisions around location, downsizing, timing, or even part-time work often matter more than chasing higher investment returns. These aren’t failures, they’re tools.
2. “What if I wait too long and lose my health?”
After money, the next fear wasn’t financial at all. It was about time. It’s expressed in statements like: “My biggest fear was dying at my laptop” or “I’m afraid I’ll lose my health before I get the chance to do the things I want.”
This fear feels different because it contains an uncomfortable truth. You can rebuild money. You can’t rebuild time. And once your health goes, your choices narrow quickly. This is why “I’ll do it later” isn’t a plan. It’s a hope.
Retirement isn’t one long phase. There are years when your body is willing, years when it’s slower, and years when it limits you. If there are experiences you care about that depend on energy, mobility, strength or confidence, they belong earlier, not deferred indefinitely.
And health can’t be treated as something you’ll deal with once you stop working. Strength, balance, mobility and prevention aren’t vanity projects. They’re what make retirement usable.
3. “Who am I if I’m not working?”
This fear surprises people, but it shouldn’t. One person put it perfectly: “Trying to get a life is way more stressful than work.”
Work quietly answers many questions for us: when to get up, where to be, who needs you, what counts as a good day. When that structure disappears overnight, it can feel deeply unsettling, even if retirement was planned.
What often goes wrong is that people expect retirement to feel good immediately. When it doesn’t, they assume they’ve made a mistake. But that uncomfortable phase isn’t failure. It’s a transition.
The answer isn’t to fill every hour or find a grand “purpose”. It’s to replace the outgoing structure in your life deliberately. A few anchors matter.
Think about setting up something that gets you moving, something that puts you in contact with people, something that feels useful or absorbing. Purpose usually grows out of commitment, learning with others and making real connection, not hobbies alone.
4. “I don’t know how to spend”
This fear is one that sounds ludicrous to anyone under 50. But it’s very real. “I’ve spent my working life being careful with money. I don’t think I know how to enjoy spending.”
This makes perfect sense. Most people have been rewarded their entire adult lives for restraint. Saving was responsible. Spending was risky. Then retirement arrives, and the instruction flips: start drawing it down.
People hesitate, delay and second-guess every purchase. Many underspend not because they need to, but because it feels safer. That can be just as problematic as overspending.
The fix is putting some spending structure in place. When you were working, pay arrived regularly and spending had boundaries. In retirement, if everything comes from one big pool, every decision feels loaded.
Paying yourself a regular amount for everyday life and separating discretionary spending creates guardrails. Once spending is planned, it stops feeling reckless. Learning how to spend is part of retirement skill-building. It’s not indulgent.
5. “The rules will change underneath me”
This fear had a different tone: people were worried about things they can’t control really affecting their plans. Think about it, inflation, rising costs, governments changing the rules, battles with Centrelink and anxiety about systems becoming more complex or cashless.
Most of these fears can usually be pinpointed back to things you already care about, but may not have proactively stepped through.
And they’re right, things do change. You simply cannot plan retirement on the assumption that nothing in the economy, politics and the bureaucracy will shift. That has never been true.
The mistake is trying to control what you can’t. The goal isn’t certainty, it’s resilience. That means setting yourself up with buffers, flexibility and not running your plan right to the edge. One focused admin day a year beats years of living with low-level anxiety.
6. “What if I end up alone?”
This was the heaviest of the fears because it’s not one many of us talk about out loud. “Losing my partner before we have time to enjoy retirement together.”
Loneliness creeps up quietly on us over our lifetime. We often forget that work provides connection by default. Retirement doesn’t do this. Connection in retirement has to be planned and proactively stepped into.
You need to find groups you can be regular with, commitments that you look forward to, places where people would notice if you didn’t turn up. For those ageing solo, this isn’t optional. You need to think about it as infrastructure to build your life around, so you never end up alone, even if you do end up single by death, divorce or choice.
Ultimately, if you’re feeling them, most of these fears can usually be pinpointed back to things you already care about, but may not have proactively stepped through.
None of them are solved by pretending they won’t happen. The best thing to do to overcome them, or lessen their grip on you, is to examine them, do the work they point you to do, and make good decisions. Have a go!
Bec Wilson is author of the bestseller How to Have an Epic Retirement and the newly released Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife. She writes a weekly newsletter at epicretirement.net and hosts the Prime Time podcast.
- Advice given in this article is general in nature and is not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that takes into account their own personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.
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