Am I Ready to Retire? A Seven-Point Readiness Checklist

1. Do you know your monthly number?

Readiness begins with one figure: what your life will actually cost per month once you stop earning. Not a percentage rule from an article — your own expenditure, honestly added up.

If you cannot state that number today, this is your first action. Everything else on this checklist depends on it.

2. Does your number include what people forget?

Three items are routinely left out: debt repayments that will still be running, regular support you give to family, and medical costs, which tend to rise with age rather than fall.

An understated number produces a plan that fails quietly, years in, when changing course is hardest.

3. Do you know what income will still arrive?

List what you can reasonably expect: pension or provident fund income, annuities, rental income, any work you intend to continue.

Readiness is the relationship between this figure and your monthly number. The difference between them is your gap — the only figure worth planning around.

4. Do you know your runway?

If your income stopped today, how long would your savings cover the gap? That length of time is your runway, and it tells you whether your situation is urgent or manageable.

A short runway is not a verdict. It is information — and it is far more useful now than later.

5. Is your debt on a path to zero?

Repayments that service interest without reducing balances do not end on their own. Retirement readiness includes knowing which balances will be gone before you stop earning — and which will not.

Directing any spare amount at one balance until it closes usually does more than spreading the same money thinly across all of them.

6. Could your plan absorb a shock?

A plan that works only if nothing goes wrong is not yet a plan. Ask what happens to your number if a major expense arrives in the first years of retirement.

The cushion does not need to be large to change the answer — it needs to exist.

7. Have you decided which lever you will pull?

There are only four levers: reduce the monthly requirement, increase the income that will arrive, extend the earning years, or increase what is set aside now.

Most people need a modest change to two of them, decided on purpose — not a dramatic change to one, decided in a hurry.

Reading your answers

Seven confident answers means your task is maintenance. Four or five means you are close, with specific work to do. Fewer than that is not a cause for alarm — it is a clear list of where to start, and starting earlier is the single greatest advantage available.