Will my money last to 95? The three numbers that decide it

It is the question underneath every other retirement question, and most people carry it around for years without ever putting numbers on it: will my money last?

The honest answer is that nobody can know for certain — markets, health and life all have other plans. But the uncertainty is not evenly spread. Three numbers do most of the deciding, and once you see your own three, the fog lifts considerably.

Why 95, and not 85

First, the horizon. A 65-year-old in Singapore today can expect, on average, roughly twenty more years — and an average means half of people get more. Roughly one in three will live past 90. Plan to 85 and you are planning for a coin flip to come up in your favour.

Planning to 95 is not pessimism about your savings; it is respect for your own odds. The plans that fail are rarely the ones that assumed too long a life.

Number one: your spending rate

Take what you plan to spend in a year and divide it by your total savings and investments. Spending S$60,000 a year from S$1.5 million is a spending rate of 4%. From S$1 million, it is 6%.

This single ratio carries more weight than anything else in your plan. A long-standing rule of thumb — the "4% rule", from research on US market history — suggests that starting around 4% and adjusting for inflation gave a portfolio a good chance of lasting 30 years. It is a useful reference point, not a law of nature: it came from one country's markets, assumed a particular investment mix, and took no account of fees, taxes or the guaranteed income you may already have.

That last point matters more than people realise. What your savings must cover is the gap — spending minus CPF LIFE payouts, pensions and any part-time income. Someone spending S$5,000 a month with S$2,500 of CPF LIFE income needs their savings to produce half of what the raw numbers suggest. Working out your true gap is the single most clarifying exercise in retirement planning.

Number two: your real return

Not the return your investments earn — the return they earn after inflation. If your portfolio makes 6% and prices rise 2.5%, your money's real growth is about 3.5%. That real return is what determines how hard your savings work while you draw them down.

Two things complicate it.

Inflation is personal. The basket a retiree buys is not the national basket, and the biggest difference is healthcare. Medical costs rise much faster than everyday prices — a 2026 industry survey (WTW's Global Medical Trends) put medical cost inflation in Singapore at 16.9% for the year. Nobody's personal healthcare spending compounds at that rate forever, but a plan that inflates every expense at 2.5% is quietly optimistic about the category that grows most as you age.

The order of returns matters. Two retirees can earn the same average return over 30 years and end up in completely different places, depending on when the bad years arrive. Poor markets in your first five years of drawdown — selling investments at low prices to fund spending — do damage that later good years struggle to repair. This is why a single average-return projection flatters almost everyone, and why serious planning runs hundreds or thousands of market scenarios rather than one straight line.

Number three: the years you must fund

The gap between the day you stop earning and age 95. Retire at 62 and it is 33 years; at 67, it is 28.

This number is powerful because it is the one you can move most directly, and it works from both ends. Each extra working year adds savings, adds compounding time, and removes a year of drawdown — a triple effect. And it does not have to be all or nothing: part-time income of S$1,500 a month in your first five years of retirement can do more for your plan's survival than a lifetime of squeezing the grocery bill, because it protects your portfolio in exactly the years when it is most vulnerable.

How the three fit together

• Spending rate sets how hard your money must work.
• Real return sets how hard it actually works.
• Years to fund sets how long it must keep it up.

None of them means much alone. A 5% spending rate might be fine for someone retiring at 70 with strong guaranteed income, and fragile for someone retiring at 58 without it. That interaction — not any single rule of thumb — is what a proper projection tests: your three numbers, run through a thousand versions of the future, including the unlucky ones.

If you want a rough first look, our free calculator does the single-scenario version in about a minute. The full picture — CPF LIFE and SRS handled correctly, healthcare inflation treated separately, drawdown order and the part-time lever — is what the Retirement Readiness Report is for.

Put your three numbers on paper this week. Whatever they say, knowing them is calmer than wondering.

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This article is general information, not personalised advice. This is a projection, not financial advice. Past performance is not a guide to future results.