Knowing Whether You’re Actually on Track

Knowing Whether You’re Actually on Track

“Am I on track?” is probably the question I hear most often, and it usually arrives with an apology attached, like asking it is admitting to a failure that hasn’t happened yet. It isn’t. It’s the right question. The problem is almost everyone gets handed the wrong answer to it, a generic, one-size benchmark that has no idea who you actually are.

I’ve watched people do genuinely well for themselves, build a stable career, save consistently, raise a family responsibly, and still walk into a conversation with me convinced they’re behind, because they saw a chart somewhere with their age on one axis and a number on the other, and their number didn’t match. That chart didn’t know anything about their actual life. It didn’t know about the years they spent paying down student debt before they could save seriously, the career break, the kid’s medical bills, the house they bought in a market that’s now objectively unaffordable for someone starting fresh. It just had an age and a number, and it let that stand in for an entire life it knew nothing about.

Where that benchmark number actually comes from

You’ve probably seen some version of it: have roughly 1 times your salary saved by 30, 3 times by 40, 6 times by 50, 10 times by the time you retire at 67. That guidance, popularized by Fidelity, isn’t arbitrary, and it comes from real modeling, not a guess. But it’s built on a specific set of assumptions: retiring and claiming Social Security at 67, replacing about 80% of your pre-retirement income, Social Security covering 35 to 40% of that, and withdrawing around 4 to 5% a year in retirement. If your actual life doesn’t match those assumptions, and most people’s lives don’t match every single one of them, the benchmark is measuring you against a hypothetical person, not your actual situation.

What the real numbers show, and why that’s not the full story either

Federal Reserve data shows median retirement savings ranging from under $19,000 for households under 35 to roughly $200,000 for households in their late sixties and early seventies, with the figure dropping again for households past their mid-seventies, reflecting that retirement savings get spent down, not just accumulated forever. Those figures sit well below the multiple-based benchmarks for nearly every age group, and more than half of households report no dedicated retirement savings at all.

I want to be careful with this, because it cuts two ways. If you’re behind a generic benchmark, you’re in the majority, not some unusual failure case. But “most people are behind” isn’t permission to stop paying attention either. It’s context, not an excuse, and it shouldn’t be read as either.

I’d also flag that these figures come from the most recent published Federal Reserve survey, which runs every few years rather than annually. By the time you’re reading this, a newer wave may exist with different numbers. The specific dollar figures matter less here than the underlying pattern they reveal: the gap between “what the benchmark says you should have” and “what most actual households have” is large and persistent, not a temporary blip from one bad economic stretch.

What a net worth number actually misses

Benchmarks built on salary multiples or net worth miss things that matter enormously to your actual financial life. They don’t account for where you live; housing costs alone create huge swings in what a given net worth actually buys. They can mask liquidity: a high number tied up in a business, concentrated stock, or an illiquid asset isn’t the same as money you can access when you need it. And they say nothing about your actual earning power, your control over your assets, or how exposed you are if one piece of the picture changes.

Two people with identical net worth can be in completely different positions. The number alone can’t tell you which one you are.

Take two women, both with a net worth of a million dollars at 45. One has it spread across a diversified portfolio, a fully funded emergency reserve, and a paid-down mortgage. The other has the bulk of it tied up in a business she can’t easily sell, a concentrated position in employer stock from years of vesting, and minimal cash on hand. On paper, they look identical. In practice, one of them could weather a job loss or a health scare without much disruption, and the other would be selling assets under pressure, at the worst possible time, to cover a gap that never should have existed. The benchmark sees one number. It doesn’t see any of that.

A better question than “am I behind”

If a single net worth snapshot isn’t the right measure, what is? Your savings rate tells you more about your trajectory than a point-in-time number ever will. Somewhere around 10% is a reasonable baseline, 15 to 20% builds real momentum faster, and rates well above that start opening up options like early retirement. Cash flow, how much room actually exists between what comes in and what goes out, matters more day to day than any net worth figure. And liquidity, how much of what you have you could actually use in a pinch, matters more than the total.

None of those questions produce a single tidy number you can compare to a chart. That’s the point. Your actual financial life was never going to fit neatly into someone else’s chart anyway.

Here’s a practical way to start using these better questions instead of the generic one. Look at your last twelve months and calculate, honestly, what percentage of your income actually went toward savings and investing, not what you intended to save, what actually happened after everything else got paid. Then look at how much of what you own you could access within a week if you genuinely needed to, separate from what’s locked into retirement accounts, real estate, or a business. Those two numbers, savings rate and real liquidity, will tell you more about your actual financial resilience than any salary multiple chart ever could.

What “on track” should actually mean for you

It should mean a number tied to your specific goals, your specific timeline, and your specific obligations, not a stranger’s assumptions about retirement age and income replacement. Building that takes more than a quiz. It takes an honest look at your real numbers and a clear sense of what you’re actually building toward, and it tends to go faster with someone who can sit across from you and ask the questions a generic chart never will.

If you dropped the generic benchmark entirely, what would “on track” actually look like for your life?

---

---

Wild Iris Financial LLC is a registered investment adviser. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial adviser and/or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed herein. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.