How Much is Enough? Rethinking Retirement for High-Income Professionals

Typically, the financial world talks about rules of thumb: Save 10–15% of your income. Aim for spending 80% of your pre-retirement income. Accumulate 25 times your annual expenses. These rules of thumb are simple, easy… and often wrong, especially for high-income professionals.

When your income outpaces the national average significantly, these one-size-fits-all formulas start to lose their usefulness. They can either underestimate what you’ll need (because your lifestyle has scaled with your income) or overestimate it (because your spending needs may shift dramatically in retirement). So how do you know what “enough” really looks like?

The Myth of “Replacement Ratios”

Let’s start by breaking up with the “80% rule.” This was originally designed for middle-income workers with steady pensions and predictable expenses. If you’re a surgeon earning $600,000 or an executive with fluctuating bonuses and restricted stock units, the idea that you’ll need 80% of your peak income does not make sense.

Instead of blindly following a ratio, we encourage clients to build a more tailored framework. The goal is a plan grounded in real numbers, real goals, and a shifting definition of what “work” even means.

A Better Framework: Lifestyle-Driven Planning

Rather than starting with income, flip the model: start with the life you want to live.

Ask:

What will my day look like in retirement?
Do I plan to travel more or less?
Will I still do some consulting, or switch to volunteer work?
How much flexibility do I want for giving, helping kids, or launching that business venture I’ve always dreamed of?

Then build your plan around these three buckets:

Must-Haves – Housing, food, healthcare, taxes. These are your non-negotiables. They should be forecasted with inflation-adjusted precision.
Want-to-Haves – Travel, hobbies, a second home, gifting. These fluctuate with your health, energy, and passions.
Nice-to-Haves – Charitable giving, family support, end-of-life planning, and legacy planning. For high-income professionals, this often becomes a central part of the equation and not a footnote.

Rethinking “Retirement” Itself

Many high earners don’t want to stop working altogether. They want to stop doing only the parts they do not like—the energy-draining activities. That changes the math.

If you earn $400,000 now and plan to slow down at 58, earning $100,000 part-time until age 68, that’s a decade of reduced portfolio drawdowns, tax-deferred growth, and potentially lower sequence-of-returns risk (negative returns early in retirement). It is also a window to experiment with meaning and purpose without fully “retiring.” We like to think of it as a retirement “test-drive.”

In our planning models, we often show scenarios that incorporate semi-retirement, second-act careers, or lifestyle businesses—not just because they pad the numbers, but because they reflect the real ambitions of the people we work with.

So, How Much is Enough?

The honest answer: it depends on how you define “enough.”

For some, enough means total financial independence and the freedom to say “no” to any future income forever. For others, it’s having the flexibility to say “yes” to only what inspires them. For a growing number of high-income professionals, it’s about time, not just money. They want to reclaim the hours they’ve sold for years to build a life with more margin and meaning.

Instead of chasing someone else’s number, let’s build your enough from the ground up, rooted in your values, flexible to change, and resilient enough to handle life’s surprises.