The granary
Also called: the store, the pile, retirement pot
Your retirement store, sized by what your life costs and how many years it must hold.
A farmer sizing a grain store asks two questions and no others: how much does this household eat in a year, and how many winters must it hold? She does not ask what the grain merchant thinks granaries should cost this spring, and she does not look over the fence at the biggest one in the village.
Eating, and winters. That is the whole shape of the answer.
The reason the image is useful is that it replaces a number you were handed with two you can measure. The eating is what your life actually costs — not what your year cost, which includes money you moved into savings and will not need to move again. The winters are how many years the store must cover.
Set against that, the headline retirement figure looks like what it is. Those numbers usually come from surveys asking people how much they think they will need — a poll of guesses, and mostly a poll of anxiety. They swing by hundreds of thousands from one year to the next, which is a fair sign they are not measuring anything. A measurement that jumps like that is trembling, not reporting.
The granary is not a smaller idea than the headline. It is a differently sourced one: your number, from your household, rather than the crowd’s number, from a company with something to sell.
Related terms
Covered properly in Learn.
This term appears in the glossary of The Quiet Fortune, Volume III.