Retirement and satisfaction

Statistics about Americans' retirement planning have a tendency to be a bit alarming.  This AEI article by Andrew Biggs and Sylvester Schieber takes an interesting approach, which is to examine the effect of children on retirement savings.  Apparently there was some recent scare-mongering about a discrepancy between the savings of families with children and those without.  Biggs and Schieber note that families with children spend a lot while the kids are at home or in college, then cut way back.  They don't drop their standard of living, though, so much as keep consuming what they always did, not counting what the kids consumed.  Parents save, therefore, not to permit themselves to adopt the standard of living common among childless people with equal income, but to preserve roughly the same standard of living they were used to, which of course makes sense.

The childless Texan99 household always adopted a standard of living significantly below that of my colleagues, even those with children.  Apparently they weren't as fanatically focused on retirement as I was; many of them seemed terrified of the idea of retirement, to be truthful.  In any case, if we get along in our working years at about the level we'd like to preserve in our retirement years, we'll be able to save a lot more than most people think is ordinarily prudent for whatever income we have.  It's not about the income, anyway, it's about getting used to whatever standard of living the income permits.  People are remarkably flexible that way.  The big thing is to be uninterested in how other people live; even if their incomes are comparable, their circumstances often are not, depending on how large a family they choose to raise and how prudent they are about emergencies and the future.