How Much Do I Need for an Interest-Only Retirement? - SmartAsset (2024)

For an interest-only retirement, you’ll need to have a large nest egg. How big a nest egg depends on your target income and the interest rate. For example, an annual income of $48,000 would require a nest egg of $1.6 million, assuming a 3% interest rate. And that’s not even accounting for inflation.

Living Off Interest Alone in Retirement

When doing the math for retirement, interest-only retirement is an ideal strategy where you invest your savings in assets that pay you interest and you live off that money after retiring without touching the principal balance.

This means that you will have to figure out where your retirement income will come from and how much of your golden age lifestyle it could maintain. But since you do not spend the principal, you could pass this nest egg on to your heirs when you die.

Interest-only retirement is a good starting point for calculating your retirement goals and needs. We’ll show you how to do the math for yourself. But you probably don’t want to plan on living off just the interest. We’ll explain why and suggest other ways of living off your savings.

How to Determine How Much to Save for Retirement

To reverse engineer the size of your nest egg, start by deciding how much income you think you’ll need. Many people expect their expenses to drop when they retire, since they won’t have to commute, buy lunch for the office, pay for regular dry cleaning, etc. But other costs, like travel and entertainment, can offset the savings. So as a general rule, experts recommend counting on needing 70% to 90% of your current expenses.

Next, you will have to choose an interest rate. Banks have paid under 1% in recent years, while they used to pay in the high single digits in the early 1990s. If you want to be conservative, you could go with 1% to 3%. If you are feeling more optimistic, you could choose 6% to 8%.

Do you need help figuring out your required minimum distributions? Try SmartAsset’sRMD calculatorto learn more.

Now, take your expected annual income and divide it by the interest rate. For example, if you think you’ll need $60,000 a year (or $5,000 monthly) and choose an optimistic 6%, you would divide 60,000 by .06. The result is your savings goal. In this case: $1 million.

For a more conservative estimate, though, divide 60,000 by 3%. That gives you a savings goal of $2 million. If you use a more conservativeinterest rate of 1% (most savings accounts fall short of the 1% interest rate these days), you would need $6 million to earn $60,000 a year in interest.

How Much You Can Earn in Interest If You Have $1 Million

There are a few different ways to invest your money to earn interest and live off of that income. The most popular investments are bonds, certificates of deposit (CDs) and annuities. The interest that you’ll earn will depend on the amount of money you have in your account when you go to live off of that interest. Here is what each of those investments would pay in interest in 5 years if you had $1 million:

You can learn more about how much interest your account could accumulate if you have a $2 million nest egg.

Why Living Off Interest Alone Isn’t a Practical Plan

Of course, for most people, a $6 million nest egg isn’t within the realm of possibility. Even accumulating $1 million is out of the reach of the majority of Americans. According to a survey conducted by the TransAmerica Center for Retirement Studies in 2023, Baby Boomers (the generation closest to retirement if not in it already), have a median $289,000 in retirement accounts.

Feasibility aside, living off the interest of your savings is a bad plan for two big reasons. First, inflation will likely depress the purchasing power of your income. So the $60,000 you think you’ll need in 30 years will actually be worth $28,600 in today’s dollars, assuming a 2.5% rate of inflation.

The Federal Reserve aims for an inflation rate between 2% and 3%. But it’s worth noting that consumer goods and services increased 9.1% during the 12-month period ending in June 2022. In June 2023, however, the inflation rate only went up 3% when compared with the previous year.

To have $60,000 in today’s dollars in 30 years, you would need to aim for an annual income of $125,900. That would reset your savings goal to $2.1 million, assuming an optimistic 6% interest rate.

Second, the calculation assumes a steady interest rate over the span of approximately 25 years. In reality, interest rates fluctuate. Between January 1991 and January 2016, a five-year certificate of deposit (CD) that was rolled over every time it matured could have earned 7.67%, 5.28%, 5.58%, 3.92%, 1.57% and 0.86% (that is less than 1%). When the interest rate is higher than you expected, you’ll have extra cash. But for the years the interest rate is lower, you’ll probably dip into savings. And if you touch the nest egg, you will lower the amount you earn every year thereafter.

Finding Other Sources of Income

Even if you have a low tolerance for risk and want safe investments, you can fund your retirement with more than the variable interest earned from a bank. First, there are annuities that provide protected income.

There are many kinds of annuities, but the simplest kind is a fixed annuity. You pay a lump sum, and in return, you get a set payout every year for the rest of your life. Often, the rate is better than the ones banks offer. But the tradeoff may be that the insurance company keeps whatever principal is left when you die.

Alternatively, if you’ve been growing your savings by investing it in the stock market with the help of a fiduciary financial advisor, you could leave it there. Probably, as you approach retirement, you’ll want to bring down the percentage in equities while raising the percentage in fixed-income (bonds) in your portfolio.

This is to help ensure that the bulk of your investments isn’t in jeopardy should the market take a nosedive when you need to make withdrawals. Traditionally, the rule of thumb for calculating how much to be in stocks has been to subtract your age from 110. That number is the percentage you should allocate to stocks. But in recent years, experts have amended the rule to subtract your age from 125.

Bottom Line

Calculating how much you need to save to be able to live off the interest alone in retirement is a good jumping-off point. It is easy to compute, and it gives you a sense of the large sum of money you’ll need for retirement. But once you have that number in mind, you should consider ways other than an interest to fund your golden years. With higher returns, you’re more likely to be able to maintain your lifestyle. As you come up with an effective strategy to be financially ready for your golden years, be sure to consult with a financial planner or financial advisor.

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