I ran the calculator again last week. Same one I've run a dozen times this year.
Type in your age. Your savings. Your expected expenses. Your life expectancy, which is its own strange thing to be asked to guess. And out comes The Number — the amount you supposedly need to retire without running out of money before you run out of years.
Mine has changed four times this year. Not because my savings changed much. Because the assumptions changed — inflation, market returns, how long I'll live. The number moves like a target in the wind, and I keep aiming at wherever it lands next.
I don't say any of this to complain about financial planning. Planning is wise. Proverbs says as much in a dozen different ways. But somewhere in my third or fourth trip to that calculator, I noticed something The Number couldn't tell me, no matter how many times I refreshed it.
It couldn't tell me if I'd be at peace.
The Anxiety Behind the Arithmetic
Here's what I've learned about myself watching that number move: I was treating it like a verdict. Hit it, and I'm safe. Miss it, and I'm not. As if my provision were entirely a function of my own math, and God's role was to stay quiet in the background while I did the real work of securing my future.
That's backwards. And if I'm honest, it's a little bit of an insult to how Jesus actually talked about this.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear… Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”
Matthew 6:25-27
I used to read that passage and assume it was about people with nothing — day laborers, the genuinely poor, people with no safety net at all. It took me a long time to realize it applies just as much to a 57-year-old with a 401(k) and a spreadsheet. The birds aren't lazy. They still work, still gather, still build. Jesus isn't condemning preparation. He's naming the worry underneath it — the worry that plans as if God isn't in the room.
I've been planning like that.
What Prudence Actually Looks Like
I still think you should save. I still think you should run the numbers, meet with an advisor if that's helpful, and take retirement planning seriously. My father-in-law didn't, and it cost him and my mother-in-law a hard decade. Faith isn't an excuse for foolishness.
But there's a difference between prudence and fear dressed up as prudence. Prudence says: plan wisely, and trust God with what you can't control. Fear says: plan obsessively, because if the number's wrong, you're finished. I've spent more of this year in the second posture than I'd like to admit.
Paul — the apostle, not me — wrote something to a church that had actually supported him financially, and it's stuck with me all year:
“And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.”
Philippians 4:19
Not "will meet all your wants." Not "will hit your number." Needs. That word has been doing some quiet work on me this year. It doesn't promise the retirement the commercials show — the beach house, the second boat. It promises enough. And I've started to wonder if the whole industry around retirement planning has quietly replaced "enough" with "optimal," and convinced men my age that anything short of optimal is dangerous.
What I'm Doing Differently
I still run the calculator. But I've started praying before I open it — not for a bigger number, but for a right relationship with whatever number shows up. My wife and I have started saying out loud, together, that we trust God with the parts of this we can't control. That's not a line I throw out lightly. Some nights it's easier to believe than others.
We've also started asking a different question than "will we have enough?" We've started asking, "what is enough, actually, for the life we're trying to live?" Those turn out to be very different questions. The first one has no ceiling — there's always a bigger cushion you could want. The second one has an answer, and ours turned out to be smaller and more peaceful than the calculator's default assumptions.
I don't have this fully sorted out. Some weeks the number still runs the show in my head more than God does. But I'm trying to hold the spreadsheet in one hand and Matthew 6 in the other, and let the second hand be the stronger one.
If you're staring at your own number right now — whatever it is, wherever it landed this week — I'd just ask you the same question I keep asking myself. What would change if you believed the number wasn't the whole story?
God bless,
Paul