The retirement number isn't a number
Spending matters more than returns. I ran the Canadian math to be sure
Most people treat their retirement number like a finish line…the one figure to hit, then stop. I used to think of it like that too, until I built the model behind YouGotThis. The part that surprised me most wasn’t the number itself. It was which inputs actually move it.
Here’s the setup…take a single 35 -year-old, $150,000 earner, retiring at 65, planning to 95, drawing roughly $24,000 a year from CPP and OAS. Run the Canadian present-value math and you land around $1.73 million in today’s dollars.
Nice, clean number. Easy to remember. Just buy XEQT and go...
But that number is the output of four inputs: how much you spend, what you get from government benefits, what your portfolio returns, and how long you live. The thing nobody tells you is that they don’t matter equally. Not even close.
When I flexed each one across a realistic range and held the others steady, here’s the order of impact that fell out:
Spending — moves the number by about $882,000
Government benefits (CPP + OAS) — about $588,000
Investment return — about $451,000
Longevity — about $360,000
Sit with that for a second, because it inverts how almost every retirement article is written.
Spending (the input you have the most say over) dominates. The gap between living on 60% of your salary and 90% is nearly a million dollars of required portfolio. Meanwhile investment return, the thing the entire financial-media machine obsesses over, sits third. And it’s the one input you don’t control.
The CPP and OAS finding surprised me most. For a dual income couple where both partners qualify near the maximum, government benefits quietly carry hundreds of thousands of dollars of the load. This is a structural feature of the Canadian system that the imported American “save 10x your salary” rules completely miss.
And longevity - the fear that drives a lot of over-saving - turns out to be the gentlest lever of the four. Planning to 100 instead of 95 only adds about $167,000, because a dollar spent 35 years out is discounted heavily in today’s terms.
What the math shows is that a retirement number isn’t a verdict you compute once. It’s a surface, and once you can see its shape, “am I saving enough?” stops being a free-floating anxiety and becomes a question with structure.
I wrote up the full breakdown — all four sensitivity tables, the worked example, the sources — over on the blog on my website.
And if you’d rather skip the spreadsheet and just see your own number, that’s what we built: free tool. No signup wall — it’s the fastest way to find your own coordinate on that surface.
— Andrew