The age-50 check
How much should I have saved by 50?
Turn fifty and the question starts mattering in a way it didn't at forty. Here's why the rule of thumb you've seen is the wrong tool, and how to get to the number that's actually yours.
Turn fifty and the question starts mattering in a way it didn't at forty. Here's why the rule of thumb you've seen is the wrong tool, and how to get to the number that's actually yours.
You'll have seen it somewhere — a table in a Sunday paper, a graphic on LinkedIn. Roughly: one times your salary saved by 30, three times by 40, six times by 50, eight by 60. Tidy, memorable, and built to fit on a slide rather than to fit you.
It isn't nonsense. As a rough sense-check it's better than nothing, and if you're miles off it — on either side — that's worth noticing. But it answers a different question from the one you're actually asking, which is closer to “am I going to be short?” A multiple of salary can't tell you that, because it was never built from your spending, your other income, or when you plan to stop.
Two people earning £70,000 at 50 get the same target from the rule — £420,000. One spends £2,800 a month and has a paid-off house. The other spends £4,600 and has eleven years left on the mortgage. Identical salary, identical rule, wildly different actual answers. The rule can't see any of that, because salary was never the number that mattered — spending was.
Salary tells you what arrived. It says nothing about what left again, and that's the number a retirement actually has to fund. Two people on the same income can need pots several hundred thousand pounds apart.
A defined benefit pension, a rental property, a spouse's income, the State Pension — each one reduces what your own pot has to produce. A multiple-of-salary target treats you as if none of that exists.
Most people in their fifties have pensions from jobs they've forgotten about. The rule assumes you know your total. A surprising number of people at 50 don't, and the true figure is usually higher than the one in their head.
For a lot of owners in this age bracket, the business is worth more than every pension put together, or it's worth nothing to anybody but them. The rule has no column for that at all.
Priti and Mark are both 50. Both put £600 a month into a pension, including whatever their employer or their company adds. Both want to stop at 65. The only difference between them is where they started.
Steady saver since her twenties. £150,000 in her pension at 50.
Ran a business through his thirties and forties and put the company first. £60,000 at 50.
Priti's £150,000 plus £600 a month becomes roughly £370,000 by 65. Mark's £60,000 plus the same £600 a month becomes roughly £229,000.
About £141,000 — from identical effort, identical contribution, identical years. The whole difference is the pot each of them was already carrying at 50.
Say Mark notices the gap at 50 and, once the business is steadier, pushes his contribution up to £900 a month for those fifteen years. His pot at 65 comes to roughly £297,000 — better, and still about £73,000 short of Priti's. That's not a reason to give up on catching up. It's the honest arithmetic of why the years already banked are worth more than almost anything you can do afterwards, and why the date you stop and the amount you spend end up doing more work, for Mark, than the contribution alone ever will. The four levers that actually move a retirement number are ranked in that order for exactly this reason.
Instead of asking “is my pot the right multiple of my salary?”, ask “does my pot, run forward from here, produce what I actually want to spend, for as long as I need it to?” That's a question with a real answer, and it doesn't need a table from a newspaper to get there.
Three numbers do it: what you spend now, what else will be coming in (State Pension is roughly £12,000 a year for most people, but not until your late sixties), and what your pot is worth today. The free projection takes those three and tells you, in about two minutes, the age your money runs out on your current trajectory — which is a far more useful answer than a multiple of anything.
Almost nobody guesses their own spending correctly, and the error is usually several hundred pounds a month in one direction. The free Healthcheck reads it off your bank account in about two minutes instead of asking you to estimate, and it's the single most common reason a plan someone built themselves turns out to be wrong.
By 50 most people have worked several jobs. Auto-enrolment has been compulsory since 2012, so anyone who's had more than one employer since then likely has more than one pot — and the ones from a decade ago are the ones nobody remembers. Tracing them is usually the first thing that changes the number, before any decision about saving more.
Auto-enrolment's minimum is 8% of qualifying earnings, split between employee and employer. It's a floor set to avoid people saving nothing, not a figure calibrated to what anyone actually needs. Plenty of people at 50 have never paid in a penny above it.
“I'll sell the business” is a plan right up until nobody wants to buy it, or the offer is half of what was assumed. It's worth modelling at what it would fetch and at zero, so the real gap between the two versions is visible rather than assumed away.
A full new State Pension is roughly £12,000 a year, but gaps in a National Insurance record are common and it isn't automatic. Your own forecast on gov.uk takes five minutes and tells you the real figure rather than the assumed one.
Free on gov.uk. Five minutes. It tells you what's actually coming rather than what you've assumed, and whether a gap can still be filled.
Not just the current one. The government's free tracing service at gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details finds the ones you've lost the paperwork for.
Not what you think you spend. The Healthcheck gets a real figure from your bank in about two minutes.
Add the pots together, add the spending figure, and run the projection. That's the number that replaces the rule of thumb — the one built from your figures instead of a table.
If several parts of the picture are pulling against each other — a business nobody's valued, old pensions nobody's traced, a stop date that's still a guess — that's what the Financial Plan is built to untangle: every pot in one projection, UK tax applied properly, run to 100.
Not wrong exactly, but built for a different job than the one people ask it to do. It's a population-level sense check, calibrated to an average income and an assumed average spending pattern that may have nothing to do with yours. If you earn £70,000 and spend £2,200 a month with the mortgage paid off, six times salary would have you saving for a retirement considerably larger than the one you're actually planning to have. If you earn £45,000 and spend £3,600 a month because you're still supporting adult children, the rule would leave you dangerously short and never tell you so. Use it as a rough early warning if you're wildly off in either direction, and replace it with your own figures as soon as you can.
No, but it does change which lever is worth pulling. At 50 you likely still have fifteen or more years before you'd want to stop, and that's real time for contributions to compound — Mark's £141,000 gap in the example above didn't close completely, but £900 a month instead of £600 still bought back most of it. What tends to matter more than the saving rate at this age is the stop date and the spending figure, because both move the answer harder than almost any realistic increase in contributions. The useful next step isn't panic, it's finding out precisely how far off you are, which a two-minute projection will tell you far more accurately than a feeling of being behind.
For a joint retirement, yes, because you'll likely be drawing on both incomes and both pots to fund one household's spending. Where it gets easy to miscount is a defined benefit pension held by one partner, which behaves completely differently from a pot of savings — it's a guaranteed, usually inflation-linked income for life, not a lump sum that runs down. A couple with one modest defined contribution pot each and one meaningful final salary pension between them can be in a stronger position than the raw pot totals suggest, because that guaranteed income acts as a floor under everything else. Model both people and both income types together rather than adding up two separate multiples of salary.
They're more common at 50 than people expect, and they're usually worth more than the person assumes, not less, because they've had two or three decades to grow untouched. The government's Pension Tracing Service at gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details is free and gives you a provider's current contact details using just the old employer's name. From there it's a letter with your dates of employment and National Insurance number asking for a current statement. It's genuinely worth doing before you draw any conclusion about whether you're behind, because a forgotten £35,000 pot from a job you left in 2003 changes the answer more than most changes to how much you save from here.
It counts, and leaving it out is one of the most common reasons people believe they need a bigger pot than they actually do. A full new State Pension is roughly £12,000 a year, index-linked and guaranteed for life, which for a couple who both qualify in full is around £24,000 between them with no investment risk attached at all. The two things worth checking rather than assuming are your own forecast on gov.uk, because gaps in a National Insurance record are common, and the age it actually starts, which for most people currently in their fifties is 67 rather than the 65 or 66 many still expect. Include the real figure once you've checked it, not the assumed one.
Start with the free projection on this site — it takes about two minutes, works in today's money, and instead of a multiple of your salary it gives you the age your own money runs out on your current numbers. Before you run it, get two things right: your real spending, using the Healthcheck rather than a guess, and every pension you actually hold, tracing the old ones if you're not sure. Those two facts, run through the calculator, replace a table from a newspaper with an answer built from your own life. If the picture has several moving parts pulling against each other, that's what the Financial Plan exists to untangle properly.
The projection runs in your browser in about a minute. Nothing is sent anywhere and no email is needed to see the answer.
Thirty minutes with a planner to work out whether you need a Plan at all. Some people leave that call having been told they don't.
One written document — every year to 100 with the tax done properly, what breaks it priced in years, and the ninety days after. £1,500.