Retirement is preparing! To have a comfortable lifestyle when you stop working, it is advisable to put money aside. But how much?
Retired, you lose your salary, which is the main source of income for most people. Even if it is replaced by the pension of retirement insurance and by possible additional pensions, this represents a shortfall. To fill it, it is advisable to save during your working life, because the amount put aside will be a supplement of resources. But it is difficult to know how much you have to save in your life to have a serene mind at the time of retirement. Alexandra, an expert in personal finance who distills her advice on her Instagram account, @Parlonsbudget_, agreed to shed light on us.
First of all, she wants to clear things up: “There is no ideal universal sum to save in anticipation of retirement. The amount that could be described as ideal depends on too many factors for this.” But then, how can we calculate the amount you need according to your personal situation? The author of Knowing how to manage your budget (to better take advantage of it!) (Larousse editions) explains that the first thing to do is to estimate the amount of your retirement pension. To do this, she advocates going to the site www.info-retraite.fr: “This is an estimate, because the amount can change if the salary evolves, if you change your jobs, etc, but it gives a base. Once you have this estimate, we see how much we will lose in terms of income and see how much you have to complete to maintain your current lifestyle”.
Then, you have to list all its charges, fixed and variable, and withdraw those that we will no longer have (for example a mortgage that we will have finished reimbursing) and add those that we will then have (more expensive mutual, because more partly supported by the company, health and comfort costs, transformation of the home to adapt it to physical changes, etc.). “Thanks to this, we will know how much it is necessary to fill the gap between the salary and the retirement pension every month”explains Alexandra to Women’s Journal. It is then necessary to multiply this amount by 12 to have the one over a year. For example, if a person earns 2,360 euros net per month (amount of the average net salary in the private sector in 2022 according to INSEE) and that it is expected that they receive 1512 euros retired (amount of average retirement in France in 2022 according to the DREES, last figures available), this will make him a shortfall of 848 euros per month. If she calculates that her various charges cost her 2000 euros per month, she will have to find 488 euros in addition to her retirement per month to maintain the same lifestyle, or 5,856 euros for a year (without taking into account unforeseen events). Obviously, this is not a universal amount, it will change according to the situations, any salary fluctuations, the conditions in place during retirement, inflation, etc.
Finally, comes the difficult task to know how many years multiply this: no one knows how long he will live, but we can base ourselves on life expectancy in the country. In any case, as the expert points out, it is necessary to plan wider, to prepare for hard blows.
In addition, Alexandra explains that we must keep in mind that “It is not because we are retired that you have to stop saving!”. As for the special projects that we could have for retirement, as traveling, she explains that it can enter the classic “projects” savings that we will continue to feed and that, in its monthly budget, we must not forget to plan a leisure budget: “It is not because we are retired that we will stop living, quite the contrary!”.
