Planning a Retirement Budget

Once I learned a minimal amount about investments, risk and inflation, I came to believe that the biggest unknown facing the retirement planner (at least this retirement planner) was trying to predict the budget they would need in order to support a satisfying retirement.

The first step in getting a better grip on this is to understand how much you are spending today and on what. A lot of affluent technical professionals make enough money that they don't track expenses very well if at all. That’s the reward for all that hard work studying math and science in college. You don’t have to budget. But the absence of an accurate expense record makes this problem even tougher. If you know how much you spend today on each aspect of your life, you can go down the list and estimate whether you are going to spend more or less on that item in retirement. Finally, you can estimate how much more or less you expect to spend.

Here's a starting list for expense tracking from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics:
- FOOD AND BEVERAGES (breakfast cereal, milk, coffee, chicken, wine, service meals and snacks)
- HOUSING (rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, fuel oil, bedroom furniture)
- APPAREL (men's shirts and sweaters, women's dresses, jewelry)
- TRANSPORTATION (new vehicles, airline fares, gasoline, motor vehicle insurance)
- MEDICAL CARE (prescription drugs and medical supplies, physicians' services, eyeglasses and eye care, hospital services)
- RECREATION (televisions, pets and pet products, sports equipment, admissions);
- EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION (college tuition, postage, telephone services, computer software and accessories);
- OTHER GOODS AND SERVICES (tobacco and smoking products, haircuts and other personal services, funeral expenses.

One advantage of using a list that conforms to the USBL list is that you can monitor inflation rates by spending category more easily. This allows you to estimate your own personal rate of inflation relative to the published CPI-U. Many people feel that the inflation rate they experience is very different than CPI-U because their purchases do not conform to the category mix used by the Bureau.

If you have a thorough understanding of what each category and sub-category costs you today, you can start to make a pretty good estimate of how much you might spend in retirement. Go through the categories one at a time.

The FOOD AND BEVERAGE category may not change much in retirement if you think your eating habits will remain the same. On the other hand, if you dine out a lot today because you’re too busy to prepare food and do dishes, you might reduce this category by quite a bit in retirement. Or maybe you want to spend more time dining at gourmet restaurants and expect this expense to rise.

HOUSING, utilities and home insurance may not change much unless you are planning on moving from your current conspicuous McMansion to a smaller retirement home. If so, make sure you capture that savings in your estimates.

APPAREL expenses may decrease a little since you won’t have to dress for the office.

TRANSPORTATION costs are likely to change significantly – either reduced because you can eliminate an expensive commute, or increase because you plan on traveling extensively when you retire.

MEDICAL CARE is a very important category to consider. If you are retiring with a paid medical insurance benefit from your ex-employer, consider yourself extremely lucky. That will help keep this cost manageable. If not, plan on an insurance expense that will rise more than the inflation rate every year. This is a tough cost to gauge with our current medical situation in the U.S.

A RECREATION budget is clearly very important to most retirees and possibly the most difficult to anticipate. Prior to retirement I knew exactly what I was spending on recreation, but that did not help me much when it came to planning that budget for retirement. While working, I only had weekends and vacations to spend any serious time on recreation. How much more time would I need to devote to this category to create a satisfying retirement? While working, I often spent money on recreation/travel services in order to save my precious, but limited vacation time. In retirement, I can choose to do many things more slowly (and less expensively).

Because I planned on traveling a lot, I broke out VACATION & TRAVEL as a separate item. I looked at several different kinds of trips I make: 1)day-long field trips, 2)camping trips, 3)road trips (travel to sites and stay in low-cost accommodations) and 4)city visits (air travel, city hotel rates, rental cars, etc). Then made an estimate of how often I thought I would want to make each type of trip, and budgeted accordingly. I then split the vacation & travel sub-budget into appropriate categories: mostly TRANSPORTATION or RECREATION.

You can continue through the remainder of the items in a similar fashion. For each category that you think might change significantly, you need to estimate the expected change. If you have the figures on your current spending by category, that’s not too difficult. When I was in doubt, I would simply guess that a 10% perturbation on the current cost was a good guess. Being an engineer, I over estimated my cost increases and underestimated my cost savings by a little. On the other hand, so far I’ve traveled a lot more than I thought I would in retirement.

Some people recommend using some simple rule-of-thumb guessing for your budget. For example, you might read that you will spend 80% as much in retirement as prior to retirement, or that you should plan to need 70% of your pre-retirement take-home pay to live off in retirement. I don't think it is wise to approach the problem this way. Those rules certainly didn't work for me – not even close.

For those who have not yet developed a detailed accounting of where their current spending is going, you may want to check out the url: http://www.golio.net/Chapter3.html

Scroll down to Section 3.3 and click on “download all excel spreadsheets”. There are also several other budget tools available through that page.
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