How Much Does It Take to Be Happy in Retirement?

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool retirement expert Robert Brokamp speaks with Wes Moss, a Certified Financial Planner®, the chief investment strategist at Capital Investment Advisors, the host of the Retire Sooner podcast, and the author of five books, including The Retire Sooner Method: The Five Secrets Behind America's Happiest (and Unhappiest) Retirees. Part 1 of their conversation covers:

• Moss' decade-plus quest to find the most important characteristics of happy retirees.
• What his updated research says about the investable net worth and income of happy retirees.
• Why even wealthy retirees fear running out of money, and how to relieve that anxiety.
• The relationship between retirement happiness and carrying a mortgage.

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A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Sept. 5, 2026.

Robert Brokamp: How much money does it take to be happy in retirement? I'm Robert Brokamp, and I get an answer to that question in Part 1 of my conversation with financial advisor and author Wes Moss, on the Saturday Personal Finance edition of The Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing podcast. We all know that it takes a certain amount of money to be able to retire. The money alone won't make your retirement years golden, and if there's one guy who knows an awful lot about the financial and nonfinancial ingredients to a happy retirement, it's Wes Moss. Wes is a Certified Financial Planner®, chief investment strategist at Capital Investment Advisors in Atlanta, the host of the Retire Sooner podcast, and the author of five books, including his latest, The Retire Sooner Method: The Five Secrets Behind America's Happiest and Unhappiest Retirees. Wes, welcome back to the show.

Wes Moss: I don't know if you remember this, but about a year ago, the last time I was here, I was testing out title ideas for this exact book and you were the one that green lit The Retire Sooner Method. Do you remember that?

Robert Brokamp: I look forward to the 5% of sales that I will get because I helped you with your title. Yes, I do remember that now that you are reminding me. Let me just say, I really enjoyed the book. I've been following your work for many years. In fact, you've been doing these surveys and studies for well over a decade, and your most recent book is based in large part on your most recent research. Tell us about the latest survey and how you use it to identify what you call HROBs, the happiest retirees on the block.

Wes Moss: I realized only in the last month or so, and I've never really put a label on someone asked about, what's your process about writing a book? The reality is that most of these projects are outcroppings of me doing radio and podcast. What I do many times a week, I do a show on good old-fashioned radio, if that still exists in Atlanta, on WSB radio called Money Matters, and I have been for I think almost 18 years at this point. I start with economic data or market data or historical data or demographic data as another example or a study. Then I try to draw a picture of that literally a visual. Then I usually have the narrative on podcasts and radio. That's really what has happened with these books, particularly with my first book about money and happiness and early retirement called You Can Retire Sooner Than You Think. I really wasn't aiming to write a book. I wanted to study the population and to find unhappy retirees and see what they do and find happy retirees and see what they do.

Then, really, that was for financial content because it was so important to me to emulate the population that we all want to be like. Of course, it's not just about money. We want a happy retirement and then all the pieces underneath that get us there. The process I go through is research first, then charts and analysis, and then narrative, which in this case, has led to my most comprehensive, most up to date book that I've ever done. Survey/research, I guess it's survey questions, and then it's research to go out and get it to be map to the U.S. census. We need people from every single state on a relative basis, an equal number of male, female, etc., to be able to really have data that we can rely on and a certain size so that the sample set gives us a degree of accuracy that we're comfortable with and that I can feel good about first. That took a really long time this time around. It's funny when your research firm is helping you after you figure out what you want to ask, they go out and it takes a long time for them to really collect the data to make sure it's mapped to the U.S. census. The first 90% goes pretty quickly, and then the last 10% takes a long time.

Then you get back this file that has 54,000 cells of data in a Google Sheet or Excel document. All you see is color coding and capital versus letters versus small capital letters to show the significance from this cell to that cell. That is just hieroglyphics in the beginning. Thankfully, I have a team here of data wizards that can help assimilate and really explore that data, then get it into some level of visual to see the relationships, the ones that really stood out to start to be able to understand what all the research really says and what it tells me, how does it inform and what can we learn from it? Once you get the initial graph, then I usually draw these out. I draw every day.

Whether it's a pie chart or house or some icon or a retirement timeline, I draw constantly. I love to then recreate these charts. Some of the drawing in this book is for me doing it. Some of it is going to an illustration firm to make it even more professional than I can do. The charts here are redone by an illustration firm, based on the exact Excel spreadsheet chart or the one I drew. That to me is the process I go through with research. Not everything makes it in the book, not every relationship is significant. They get thrown on the cutting room floor and the really powerful data points that say, this is what this happy population does, and this is what the unhappy population does and here's the relationship between those two. That's when I get super excited to be able to have a story to tell and to help inform what most Americans would like to do is shave off a couple of years of working and be able to have financial freedom sooner and make sure that when we get there, we're doing the lifestyle habits that put us in the happy retiree camp and avoid the unhappy camp. That is my mission in the world.

On our wall here in our office, it says, helping families find happiness in retirement. I add as soon as reasonably possible when I do my work. That's the genesis of this, and it's so much fun when the light bulbs start to go off and you get to see these relationships and what we can learn. It's so exciting to me. The arduous part is getting it all into a book. But now that the book is done, the marathon part is over. Now I get to celebrate a little bit, have some Gatorade and talk about it. Maybe Mic Ultra after all of those miles. That to me is the cool part, the fun part, and being on shows like you, which I've been here before, and thank you for having me back, but this is the fun part.

Robert Brokamp: Knowing your work like I do, and then reading your book, it seemed that some of the research confirmed the previous research. Some of it was new insights, and we'll get to those and some of it sort of built on the previous research, but with updated numbers. Let's start with something for which the number has changed, and it's likely a topic most people first think about when it comes to retirement, which is how much someone needs to have saved. Tell us about the updated Money Green Zone.

Wes Moss: This started to get to me, and this is part of the reason I was coaxed pushed into doing starting over. It's because my original book around this research was almost 15 years old. I spent a year updating that book, and we'd gone through all this hyperinflation in America, and I wrongly assumed that I could just take my old research, update it for inflation. For example, in my original work around this, the retiree happiness inflection point for going Unhappy to the Happy Group was 500K. Now, that was heresy 15 years ago. Even 15 years ago, people said, that's not nearly enough money to retire. People also said, that's way too much money. I can never get there. I got it from both sides. When I updated that just purely for inflation, the number came out to the mid-seven hundreds. As I tried to update the book, and I spent a year doing it. I spent a whole year doing it. At the end of that time, at the end of 2024, I just said, this is crap. This is just you can't recreate and just dress up something you did a long time ago. I don't know why committing to a full-blown everything research project is a little scary. I don't know if I want to redo all of this because I've been telling the world about all these habits for 12 or 13 years at the time. I guess I was worried that if I restarted it, it would contradict, and then I'd have to redo everything.

There's a weird thing in the world we live in. You write an article 15 years later, guess what? It's still on the Internet. How do you account for that? Then I got to the point where I remember I was sitting in my kitchen talking about how I was frustrated with the project that I had spent a year on. I said, you know what? I'm just going to start over completely. I don't care if all the research comes back, totally different, similar, not similar. I said, at this point in my career, I don't care. I need the actual data because I have to feel totally confident in it if I'm going to teach it. I have to see that whatever it may be, that's the story to tell. Remember, data first, chart second, narrative third. That to me was a leap. The numbers came back differently. If somebody reads an article about money and happiness habits that I wrote about 12, 13 years ago, that is all superseded by this. The Money and Happiness in America study I did that eventually became the book The Retire Sooner Method, which is the Green Book now on Amazon. The numbers are different. It was at 500. I'm glad it didn't go with the inflation adjusted at 743, I think it was. Before I give you that number, I looked at this in a different way than I've ever looked at it before, and I give credit to our chief investment officer here, who is a data wizard as we went through all of this data, we looked at the population, we said, What if we mapped this or charted this habit in relation to the baseline? Let's get a baseline happiness level for our entire study.

Then we'll see if a habit takes us above the baseline or below it, like if you're managing a mutual fund, you want Alpha. If you're managing a hedge fund, we want Alpha. If the S&P is up 10%, my fund is up nine, I've got negative one. If it's up 15, I've got five points of Alpha. That's a good thing. That's the way we did the visuals, and that's the way we interpreted this data. Essentially, happiness Alpha of a particular habit. Where Alpha starts or happiness levels show that they rise well above the U.S. happiness baseline from a liquid investment asset perspective, the category where it starts to be a way above the U.S. Happiness baseline is $1 million. The next category where it still rises ever so slightly is the $3 million-plus camp. As long as we get to that level, my data shows that in general, the population has significantly higher levels of happiness. Now, happiness can be defined a lot of ways, but there's peace of mind there. I looked at it. The green zone for household income starts at $100K. I think a lot of your listeners will be able to consume that quickly, and they'll get that. But there's also the red zone and the yellow zone where people levels of happiness that are way below the baseline. It just speaks to Americans whether you agree with these numbers or not. Some people say that's not enough. Some people say I can never get to $1 million. Those are the numbers that correlate to higher levels of retirement happiness and peace of mind. That, to me, is really powerful.

Robert Brokamp: One of the aspects that you point out in your book about what makes someone happy, at least when it comes to the money, is just the comfortability of knowing that you're not going to run out of life.

I thought one of the interesting insights from your book was, that's a fear everybody has. Even people with a lot of money, according to your book, 39% of people with more than $1 million, less than $3 million fear running out of money, and even 25% of those with $3 million or more are worried about running out of money. I know a lot of people hearing that will say, how can they possibly feel that way? But I think it's just a natural fear in your book. You cite the stat the study from Allianz that found that more people are worried about running out of money than dying. How do you manage your retirement in a way that you can feel good about the amount that you have once you're over in that green zone?

Wes Moss: Isn't that amazing? Now, if you look at the chart, the way we lay that out. Yes, the fear of running out of money as a primary fear comes down as a percent of the population within higher and higher asset bands. But it doesn't go away. I'm so glad that resonates with you because that's a shocker to me that somebody with 3 million liquid, which, by the way, means they probably have $6, 7$ million net worth. They're nervous? That's a top fear: running out. I think of this as a financial educator. We can learn tactics that help reduce our money anxiety. Diversification. I talk about in the investment chapters here, my dry powder principle, which is three years plus of safety assets in your overall allocations, knowing that the average bear market lasts 2.9 years. There's some years behind that.

Here's the education of why your portfolio could be structured like this, and that should reduce your anxiety. You don't need to worry about running out of money, and we'll follow the 4% plus rule, 4% plus rule works 98% of the time for 30-plus years. You get all that education, and you probably don't have that fear. But it only takes a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months without revisiting that. The headlines that we live in are so scary that all of that gets washed away like a tsunami on the beach, and all of a sudden, those houses are gone. That house of confidence and understanding, it just gets wiped away. It's gone. That's the reality of the underlying fear we have is not the headline. Is what the headline means for our money. The word financial crisis and banking crisis and bear market and bear market with recession. What does that mean? Does it mean it wipes me out? I don't remember, because I haven't looked at this for a month or two, and I forget why I shouldn't have this money anxiety. That's why the world of keeping ourselves, feeling confident financially very much is an ongoing sport. It is not a one time event. It's a constant reminder education.

What I think holds that all together is written planning. You can draw out a retirement timeline, either you by yourself or you with an advisor and just the act of drawing out a timeline, seeing what you have today, target retirement zone in the future. I'm going to save this much. Here's about what I should have. Take the 4% rule apply it to that, plus Social Security, maybe a pension, and real estate income, and woah. I've done a conservative roadmap timeline that is one of the main elixirs in the world that we live in psychologically to reduce or eliminate the very deep-rooted fear so many Americans have, which is, hey, I just don't want to run out of money.

Robert Brokamp: Another interesting aspect of your research is the relationship of retirement and whether the mortgage is paid off. I think it's tied to this to a certain degree because if you're worried about running out of money, you're worried about covering your bills. The mortgage is the biggest bill. If you don't pay it, if you really want to take it to the extreme, you're like, Oh, my gosh, I could lose my house. Tell us about your research in terms of retirement happiness and having the mortgage paid off.

Wes Moss: This is another good example of asking a similar question that I did almost 15 years ago and getting updated numbers. The vast majority of Americans have locked in low mortgages because we had zero interest rates for so long. By the way, Home Equity right now is about as much as it's ever been in the history of America, 71%, 72% of housing value is equity, which is a remarkable number and a big part of why we have such a big wealth effect in America right now. But the psychological piece of the equation of no longer having to write a check that's $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a month to a bank, something very significant happens as writing that check gets closer to not having to be part of your life anymore. Looking at the U.S. retirement baseline, happiness levels jump once we get to nine years or less, which, by the way, that's still a lot of years. Then it stays in what I would call the housing money green zone. It continues to be well above U.S. happiness baseline on happiness propensity level once our mortgage is paid off completely. Zero years. I don't think retirees have to have their mortgage paid off when they stop working, but I think payoff should be within sight. It's shown clearly in this research in the book that that's a powerful part of the financial equation.

Robert Brokamp: That’s the end of Part 1 of my discussion with Wes Moss. Tune in tomorrow for the rest of our conversation. Until then, thanks so much for listening. Thanks to Bart Shannon, the engineer for this episode and the tallest man in all of Fooldom.

As always, people on this program may have interest in the investments they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. Don't buy or sell investments based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Robert Brokamp. Fool on, everybody.

Robert Brokamp, CFP, EA has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.