What your retirement could look like: retirement living standards in the UK

Anyone planning for FIRE 1 knows it’s hard to think about retirement living standards while you’re still having a blast in your 20s and 30s – or even when you’re neck-deep in your responsible 40s and 50s. Like a precog from Minority Report, you can only glimpse fragments of your future. Happily, intrepid retirees have sent us back reports from the frontier. And they’ve supplied just enough detail to fill in the ‘Here Be Dragons’ gaps in your FI map. The resultant research – Retirement Living Standards in the UK: 2025 update – plots three tiers of retirement spending: from Minimal to Moderate to Comfortable. This annually-updated paper also reveals what kind of retirement living standards such spending really gets you – from people who are already doing it. Much ado about much more than nothing Retirement research gives us a shortcut to answering that perennial awkward cocktail party question: How much do I need to retire? Okay, maybe it’s only personal finance bloggers who get asked…