I retired at 63 with $850K, but now my finances are keeping me up at night. How do I know if I really have enough?
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As markets swing wildly from one headline to the next, a growing number of retirees are discovering volatility doesn’t just threaten their portfolios — it threatens their peace of mind.
An Allianz survey found that 64% of respondents are more worried about running out of money during retirement than about dying (1).
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With so much worry going around, is everybody justified in feeling that way?
Let’s consider Mike, who is retired at age 63 and has a healthy $850,000 nest egg. On paper, he should feel secure. Yet instead of enjoying his days, he finds himself opening his retirement account app five times a day, watching the balance tick up and down with the market.
Each dip sparks anxiety: What if I run out? What if this isn’t enough?
While Mike might look like he’s doing well, he’s still burdened by the worry faced by so many retirees. No matter how well you prepare for retirement, you may still find yourself anxious about money in your golden years.
And once that worry creeps in, even a sizable nest egg can feel fragile — especially when your account balances are fluctuating daily with the market.
But there are still ways to stop worrying and enjoy retirement.
Here’s how to get to a healthier place and avoid the constant stress of worrying about your financial future.
Let a financial advisor do the dirty work
Looking at Mike, he actually has a pretty solid retirement plan.
To start, his $850,000 nest egg is certainly nothing to sneeze at — especially considering a 2026 survey by Clever Real Estate found that 29% of retirees had no savings at all (2).
More importantly, Mike’s retirement accounts are invested, which is already a great way to make sure his nest egg will grow. It will also help combat inflation to ensure that he doesn’t outlive his hard-earned savings.
However, investing means that the account values can change daily, or even hourly, which isn’t easy. Watching those shifts in real time can make even the most diligent saver feel like they’re gambling with their future.
That’s why one of the most effective ways to quiet the worry is to let a professional do the dirty work of watching the markets and overseeing your accounts. Having that peace of mind alone is a good enough reason for hiring a financial advisor.
But there are other practical reasons, too.
One essential reason for hiring a financial advisor in retirement is so that they can help you figure out how much you can withdraw from your savings without depleting your funds. Using their expertise, they can help calculate a sustainable withdrawal rate based on your savings, investment mix and unique lifestyle needs.
They can even test different scenarios and show you how long your money is likely to last.
In short, a financial professional can do a lot to ease your retirement worries.
Create a safe withdrawal plan with a financial advisor
But the process of finding an advisor itself can be time consuming and difficult, let alone figuring out if they align with your needs — like assessing whether the 4% rule will work for you. That’s where matching services can come into play.
If you have a portfolio of $250,000 or more, platforms like WiserAdvisor can connect you with vetted professionals who specialize in this kind of planning.
Simply answer a few questions about your savings, retirement timeline and overall investment portfolio.
From there, WiserAdvisor reviews its network to match you — for free — with up to three vetted, reputable advisors aligned with your specific needs.
WiserAdvisor is a matching service and does not provide financial advice directly. All matched advisors are third parties, and specific financial results are not guaranteed.
Get less creative with your money
Working with an advisor helps ensure that your money is allocated in a way that doesn’t keep you up at night.
In Mike’s case, knowing a professional is guiding his decisions could alleviate the anxiety that leads him to check his balances five times a day. Once he’s able to stop fixating on his balance, he won’t have to worry about every little bump in the road.
That’s when he can really start finding ways to boost his nest egg. However, since his retirement fund is already invested, he might have to look to other ways to make his savings see some real growth.
And sometimes that means taking the slow and steady route.
For example, rather than handpicking stocks, investing in index funds and ETFs might actually be more beneficial for Mike for a little bit of an extra boost. The beauty of ETF investing is its accessibility — anyone, regardless of wealth, can take advantage of it — and its consistency.
“The trick is not to pick the right company, the trick is to essentially buy all the big companies through the S&P 500 and to do it consistently and to do it in a very, very low cost way,” Warren Buffett once said during an interview with CNBC (3).
But not everyone has the discipline to set aside money to invest every month. That’s where robo-advisors can help you get started. This can also be a great strategy for those who are just starting out with their investing, or look at the next 30 years of their lives in the run up to retirement.
Invest your spare change
With Acorns, even small amounts can grow over time.
Acorns is the app that lets you automatically invest spare change from your everyday purchases into a diversified portfolio of ETFs managed by experts at leading investment firms like Vanguard and BlackRock.
Here’s how it works: Once you link your debit and credit cards, Acorns automatically rounds up each transaction to the nearest dollar and invests the difference in a smart investment portfolio for you.
For instance, if you buy a donut for $3.25, Acorns will round up the purchase to $4 and invest the change in a smart investment portfolio. So a $3.25 purchase automatically becomes a 75-cent investment in your future.
But this kind of investment comes with a key limitation: liquidity.
Open a high-yield account
If you’re concerned about keeping access to your money when you need it, you may want to make sure you have a healthy emergency fund. That way you can let your money do its time in the market without having to withdraw anything. The key here is to make sure the interest rate on your liquid accounts beat the rate of inflation.
A high-yield account like a Wealthfront Cash Account can be a great place to grow your uninvested cash, offering both competitive interest rates and easy access to your money when you need it.
A Wealthfront Cash Account currently offers a base APY of 3.30% through program banks, and new clients can get an extra 0.75% boost during their first three months on up to $150,000 for a total variable APY of 4.05%.
That’s ten times the national deposit savings rate, according to the FDIC’s March report.
Additionally, Wealthfront is offering new clients who enable direct deposit ($1,000/mo minimum) to their Cash Account and open and fund a new investment account an additional 0.25% APY increase with no expiration date or balance limit, meaning your APY could be as high as 4.30%.
To be clear, this isn’t an “either-or” discussion. Having both an emergency fund and regular investments can help with securing your retirement.
Invest in a way that matches your comfort level
Even with smart investments and the aid of a financial advisor, the key to investing in retirement is there is no one-size-fits-all rule. It’s creating a mix that feels secure.
That’s because when you’re younger, growth is the goal — a heavy stock allocation can make sense. But once you’re in retirement, the stakes are different. A market downturn can be harder to recover from when you’re drawing down your accounts.
However, if Mike knows his money is being invested in a way that won’t lead to big swings — and that those allocations align with his comfort level — he’ll be less tempted to check his investment accounts five times a day for reassurance.
One way Mike could secure his retirement accounts is by diversifying his investments outside of the stock market. And he could be smart to do so. Many financial experts recommend some amount of hedging against dips in the stock market (4).
For Mike, it may just help him to stop checking his investment app five times each day.
Invest in real estate with as little as $100
If Mike is looking for a secure option, he should consider investing in real estate.
While investing in real estate may seem like a bold move at Mike’s age — as it usually requires a huge upfront capital expenditure — there’s actually a way of doing it that doesn’t require you to purchase a property outright.
For example, the Arrived Real Estate Income Fund is designed to generate regular dividend income while focusing on capital preservation.
The fund already manages more than $83 million in assets and has historically delivered an annualized cash yield of more than 8.1%. To put this in perspective, even the “aristocrats” of dividend stocks struggle to reach a high-water mark of 5.51%, according to Morningstar (X).
How it works is simple: Arrived offers short-term loans for professional real estate projects seeking to renovate, refinance or fund new construction. Each loan goes through a disciplined selection process and is backed by residential real estate, adding another layer of underwriting rigor and downside protection.
Even better, Arrived Real Estate Income Fund investors also have quarterly liquidity options beginning six months after their initial investment, offering more flexibility than many traditional income-focused investments.
Diversify your portfolio with a gold IRA
Another option for investment outside of the stock market is the usual suspect — gold. The logic goes like this: Unlike the U.S. dollar, gold can’t be printed at will and has intrinsic value that’s recognized around the world. The limited supply helps.
A gold IRA is one option for building up your retirement fund with an inflation-hedging asset.
Opening a gold IRA with the help of Goldco allows you to invest in gold and other precious metals in physical forms while also providing the significant tax advantages of an IRA.
If you’re curious whether this is the right investment to diversify your portfolio, you can download your free gold and silver information guide today. Just keep in mind that gold is typically best used as one part of a well-diversified portfolio.
Rely on guaranteed income to ease the pressure
In the end, the less reliant you are on your nest egg, the less worried you might be about running out of money. Relying more on guaranteed income streams, like Social Security, is key here.
Mike can choose to claim benefits now as he’s already 62, but doing so locks him into permanently reduced checks. Waiting until his full retirement age of 67 means a higher benefit, while delaying until 70 boosts his monthly income even further. Understanding these tradeoffs — and choosing the right age to claim — can make a big difference in how secure he feels.
Some retirees also consider annuities or other products that provide a steady lifetime income. The point is to build a foundation of predictable money each month, so the entire burden doesn’t rest on the investment accounts. For Mike, knowing his essential bills will always be covered by Social Security, and perhaps other guaranteed sources, can make the ups and downs of his portfolio less frightening.
Mike’s story is a reminder that worry in retirement isn’t always about the numbers. Even with $850,000 in savings, the lack of a paycheck can create an uneasy feeling of vulnerability.
The path forward isn’t to watch account balances obsessively, but to create a system that replaces that daily reassurance: a withdrawal plan guided by an advisor, an investment strategy that aligns with her comfort level and guaranteed income streams that cover her needs.
With those safeguards in place, Mike and retirees like him can stop treating retirement like a gamble and start enjoying the years they’ve worked so hard for.
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