How much is enough?

This is one of the most asked questions about retirement.  Of course, the answer differs for every individual.  It has a great deal to do with how much financial security you require to feel safe and what your requirements for money are.  I have never been one to worry about financial security, always believing that I will find a way to survive.  I have also had times in my life when I had very little money and still managed to live a pretty happy life.

For example, in 1994, I quit my very high paying government job with its wonderful defined benefit pension plan, and went back to university; I then started my own business.  During the next five years, I lived on less than $20,000 a year.  I continued to pay for a good share of our basic living expenses, I built up more debt than I was comfortable with, but my quality of life during that five years was much higher than when I was working in the public service.  I had a flexible schedule, could visit my elderly parents whenever I felt like it, had more time for the other important people in my life, and could work in my home office when I felt like working.  I actually put in pretty long hours but just didn't seem to be as tired as I used to be.  This degree of personal control over my time helped me to become much healthier because I wasn't feeling exhausted all the time, and I found that I enjoyed the challenge of living a happy life without alot of money.

So...when I listen to people who are still working worrying sometimes endlessly about whether they will have enough money in retirement (alot of this worry  fuelled by every newspaper article ever written by those in the financial services industry), I really wonder how carefully these pre-retirees have considered what is really important to them, if they realize that as we age we'll spend more time trying to get rid of things, than to accumulate them, that people will take on an importance like never before and that it is possible to live a healthy and happy life, without having huge sums of money socked away.