Sixty-four percent of Americans say they are more afraid of running out of money than they are of dying.

Let that sink in for a moment.

That striking finding comes from the 2025 Retirement Survey published by the Allianz Center for Retirement Studies. And if you’re a pre-retiree or retiree in the Pasadena area, chances are this statistic doesn’t surprise you, because you may have felt this fear yourself.

Retirement anxiety is real. It’s widespread. And perhaps most importantly, it’s changing the way people make financial decisions in ways that can quietly derail an otherwise solid retirement plan.

What’s Driving Retirement Anxiety Today?

According to the Allianz study, the top concerns fueling retirement anxiety include inflation and rising cost of living, healthcare costs, market downturns, taxes, and Social Security instability.

Here in the Greater Los Angeles area, these concerns feel especially close to home. The cost of living in Pasadena is significantly higher than the national average. Healthcare costs continue to climb. And concerns about the long-term solvency of Social Security are hardly abstract; they’re front-page stories.

The result? A quiet but powerful anxiety that settles in for many people as they approach retirement. And that anxiety, left unaddressed, can lead to financial decisions that do real, lasting harm.

Fear Changes Behavior – And Not Always for the Better

This is the part that concerns me most as a retirement planner serving families in the Pasadena area: retirement anxiety doesn’t just cause discomfort; it can also drive behavior.

When fear dominates the retirement planning process, here’s what I commonly see:

Unnecessary retirement delays. Some people continue working years longer than they need to. Not because they want to, but because they’re afraid to stop. They’ve never clearly answered the question: Do I have enough? Without that clarity, fear fills the void.

A flight to “safety” that isn’t actually safe. When anxious investors move money into what they believe are safe havens: low-yield savings accounts, overly conservative portfolios, or products that promise protection but carry hidden costs, they often trade one risk for another. The risk of running out of money can actually increase when returns can’t keep pace with inflation over a 20- or 30-year retirement.

Chronic underspending in retirement. This one surprises people. Many retirees who have worked hard, saved diligently, and arrived at retirement with adequate resources are so afraid of spending down their principal that they live far below their means and miss out on the retirement they worked so hard to build.

Disengagement altogether. Perhaps the most dangerous response: some people simply disengage from retirement planning entirely. The complexity and the fear feel too overwhelming, so they do nothing. And inaction, in this context, is itself a decision with real consequences.

Retirement Planning Is About More Than the Numbers

After more than 35 years of helping families in Pasadena and throughout Greater Los Angeles plan for retirement, I’ve come to see this work differently than the traditional savings-centric model most people grew up with.

Yes, the numbers still matter. How much you’ve saved, what you can expect from Social Security, and how your portfolio is allocated. These are essential inputs to any retirement plan. But they’re not enough.

Retirement planning today is about three things: reducing regret, stabilizing income, and restoring psychological safety.

The Allianz study reinforced what I see every day with clients. Nearly half of Americans don’t have a formal financial plan. And a significant portion of those who do have savings still don’t know how to convert what they’ve accumulated into a reliable stream of income. They’ve saved a lump sum, but they don’t know how to turn that into a paycheck that lasts.

That’s the question at the heart of modern retirement planning: How do I turn my savings into income that lasts as long as I do?

What Retirees Actually Want (According to the Research)

The Allianz study went beyond the fear and asked people to describe what they actually want from retirement. The answers were remarkably consistent.

Income that lasts as long as they do. People aren’t just worried about market returns. They’re worried about longevity. With many retirees living into their 80s and 90s, the question isn’t just how much you have, it’s whether it will last.

Protection from major losses. Not the elimination of all risk, but meaningful protection from the kinds of catastrophic losses that permanently impair a retirement plan.

Simplicity, automation, and reliability. Retirees don’t want to be glued to financial news or constantly managing their portfolios. They want a plan that works, one they can trust, so they can focus on living their retirement, not managing it.

To be seen as a person, not a model. This one resonated with me deeply. People want to work with a financial planner who understands them – their goals, their family, their values, their version of a good retirement, not just someone who plugs numbers into a spreadsheet and spits out a generic allocation.

What This Means for Your Retirement Plan

If you recognize yourself in any of this, if retirement anxiety is a factor in your life, or if you’ve realized you don’t have a clear answer to the question “how will I turn my savings into income?” – here are three things worth considering.

Get clarity on your income floor. Work with a fee-only fiduciary financial planner to build a reliable baseline of income that covers your essential expenses: Social Security, any pension income, and potentially a portion of your portfolio structured for regular distributions. When your essentials are covered, anxiety tends to drop significantly.

Separate your wants from your fears. Many retirement decisions are driven more by fear than by actual financial necessity. A good retirement plan helps you distinguish between the two, so you can make decisions based on your goals rather than your anxiety.

Find an advisor who sees you as a person. The Allianz study put it plainly: people want to work with someone at the intersection of experience, expertise, and perspective. Someone who understands the numbers and understands you. As a fee-only, fiduciary financial advisor, I’m legally obligated to act in your best interest, not to sell you products or earn commissions. That alignment matters.

The Bottom Line

The fear of outliving your money is one of the most common and underappreciated, challenges in retirement planning today. It’s not a sign of weakness or irrationality. It’s a rational response to genuine uncertainty.

But fear shouldn’t be the primary driver of your retirement decisions. Clarity should be.

At Mission Street Wealth, we help pre-retirees and retirees in Pasadena and throughout the Greater Los Angeles area cut through the noise to build retirement plans grounded in evidence, tailored to your life, and designed to give you the confidence to actually enjoy your retirement, not just survive it.

If you’d like to have that conversation, we’d love to talk with you.