Lifetime happiness vs. the age you retire
Your wealth over time
How much happiness money & freedom buy, by age
Both peak in your healthy adult years. Money's payoff fades more slowly than freedom's, because wealth can buy comfort and care when your health can no longer buy adventure.
Scenario comparison
| Strategy | Lifestyle funded | Wealth at end | Lifetime happiness |
|---|
How this works & the research behind it
Wealth (today's dollars). Everything is shown in real terms. Your nominal return is discounted by inflation to a real return — (1+return)/(1+inflation) − 1 — and that's what compounds your portfolio, so a 10% return with 3% inflation really grows your buying power by ~6.8%/yr. While working you add savings (income − spending). In retirement the default sustainable rule spends only the real return, so your principal keeps its purchasing power and the nest egg lasts indefinitely; the egg you need is roughly retirement spending ÷ real return. If returns can't cover your target, consumption is capped at the return (you live leaner rather than eroding capital). Turn the sustainability switch off to allow drawing principal down instead.
Happiness. Each year of life earns happiness from two sources:
- Money —
moneyEmphasis × enjoymentAbility(age) × ln(1 + spending/satisfies). Thelncaptures diminishing marginal utility: happiness rises with the logarithm of income, so the first dollars matter far more than the last. - Freedom —
freedomEmphasis × freedomValue(age) × freeTimeFraction. Retired = a fully free year; working = only the slice of free time you set.
The enjoyment-ability and freedom-value curves both rise out of childhood (kids face real limits) and fade with declining health — the single biggest multiplier on what you can do with money and time. The tool then tries every retirement age and picks the one with the highest total. Retire too early and you starve the high-value middle years of money; retire too late and you burn your healthiest, freest years at work.
Grounded in:
- Killingsworth, Kahneman & Mellers (2023), Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved — well-being rises with log income. PNAS
- Bill Perkins, Die With Zero — the utility of money declines with age; fulfillment = f(health, money, free time), with health the largest factor. Interview
- Blanchett, Estimating the True Cost of Retirement — the retirement "spending smile" (go-go / slow-go / no-go years). Kitces
- Blanchflower — the U-shaped happiness curve over the lifespan, lowest near age 47. PMC
- Healthspan vs. lifespan: disability-free life expectancy ≈ 63–64 years. Eurostat