When I was a kid, becoming a millionaire sounded like a life goal.

Millionaires lived in mansions. They had boats and holiday homes. They drank champagne at odd hours for no obvious reason.

Now, if retirement surveys are to be believed, $1 million is roughly the amount Australians think they’ll need just to stop worrying.

Australians say they would like to retire at 62, but expect reality will push that closer to 66, according to a Colonial First State report.

Somewhere along the way, the retirement goalposts moved. And they keep moving.

The strange thing is that Australians are richer than previous generations by most measures. Yet, we seem less convinced we’re ever going to have enough.

Part of the problem is that we’re asking the wrong question.

People want to know how much money they need to retire. The better question is: how much do you need to spend?

Because $1m can be either an enormous amount of money or nowhere near enough.

If you have $1m in super and only need $50,000 a year to live comfortably, you’re in pretty good shape.

If you have $1m in super and need $150,000 a year to fund your lifestyle, you’ve got a problem.

You could burn through capital surprisingly quickly and eventually find yourself relying on the age pension despite starting retirement as a millionaire.

The retirement target isn’t the number individuals should focus on.

What matters is whether your assets can support your spending for the rest of your life.

Comfortably numb

Ah, Pink Floyd. The word that causes all the trouble is “comfortable”.

Everyone wants a comfortable retirement.

The problem is that everyone’s definition is different.

For one couple, comfortable means a paid-off home, the occasional domestic holiday, dinners out with friends and spoiling the grandkids from time to time.

For another, it means annual overseas travel, golf memberships, expensive hobbies and helping the kids into the property market.

Neither definition is wrong. But they require vastly different amounts of money.

That’s why blanket statements about how much you need for retirement are almost always misleading. The answer differs because spending differs.

Lifestyle inflation

One of the sneakiest financial phenomena is lifestyle inflation. As income rises, spending tends to rise with it.

The house gets bigger. The holidays get better. The wine improves.

The kids’ schools become more expensive. The definition of “normal” quietly expands.

The trap is assuming retirement will somehow reverse all of this. It rarely does.

Most people don’t want a retirement lifestyle that’s worse than their working-life lifestyle. Many want it to be better.

After all, retirement is supposed to be the reward for decades of effort.

The challenge is that bigger lifestyle expectations require bigger retirement balances.

And that’s a major reason the goalposts keep moving.

Enough keeps changing

I’ve noticed that people are remarkably bad at recognising when they’ve reached “enough”.

A couple pays off their mortgage and immediately starts worrying about whether their super balance is large enough.

They reach their super target and start worrying about inflation. Then about living to 100-years-old. Then about helping the children. Then about aged care.

Financial security often becomes less about the money itself and more about uncertainty.

There is always another risk to insure against.

Always another scenario to plan for.

Always another article claiming you’ll need more than you thought.

The real calculation

Retirement planning isn’t really about building the biggest pile of money possible.

It’s a matching exercise. Assets on one side. Spending on the other.

If the assets can sustainably support the spending, you’re probably fine. If they can’t, something has to change.

Either spending comes down, savings go up, or retirement gets postponed.

None of these solutions are particularly glamorous.

But they are far more useful than chasing some mythical retirement number.

A million dollars sounds impressive.

Two million sounds better. Three million sounds better still.

But without understanding your spending, they’re just numbers.

Moving the posts

The retirement goalposts will probably keep moving.

Inflation will see to that. Lifestyle expectations will help. And the financial industry won’t exactly discourage it.

But a successful retirement has never been determined by a magic number.

It’s determined by whether your money can support the life you want to live.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether you’ve got enough money to retire.

Perhaps the better question is whether you’ve worked out what retirement is actually going to cost.

Bruce Brammall is the author of Mortgages Made Easy and is both a financial adviser and a mortgage broker. bruce@brucebrammallfinancial.com.au