How much should I have saved by 30/35/40? (and why the answer is wrong)

You’ve googled it. Maybe at 2am. Maybe after someone at work casually mentioned their pension pot. You typed “how much should I have saved by 30” and got hit with a wall of numbers that made your stomach drop.

If that’s you — you’re not behind. You’re just using the wrong map.

The number isn’t wrong. The question is.

“How much should I have saved by 30?” feels like a sensible, adult question. It feels responsible to ask it. But buried inside it is a comparison — to someone else’s situation, someone else’s income history, someone else’s starting line.

The benchmarks you find (typically “1x your salary by 30, 3x by 40”) come from a specific context: American retirement research, modelled on median US incomes, written for a workforce with different tax structures, different state pension equivalents, and very different housing costs than the UK.

You are not the median American worker. And even if you were, median means half of people are below it.

What’s actually happening in your brain

Here’s the behavioral science bit — because understanding why these numbers feel so catastrophic is more useful than the numbers themselves.

Anchoring

Richard Thaler (Nobel laureate, behavioral economist) helped establish that humans are disproportionately influenced by the first number they encounter when making a judgment. This is called anchoring. Once you’ve read “you should have £30,000 saved by 30,” that figure becomes a psychological reference point — and everything gets measured against it.

The anchor doesn’t need to be accurate or relevant to you to do its damage. It just needs to exist.

Once your brain has a number, it uses it as a baseline. Miss the baseline, and you feel like you’re failing — even if the baseline was never designed for your life.

Leon Festinger’s social comparison theory (1954) explains our near-compulsive drive to evaluate ourselves against others. It’s not vanity — it’s how we calibrate our sense of safety and status within a group. Evolutionarily, falling behind the group was genuinely dangerous.

The problem is that in 2024, “the group” is no longer your village. It’s everyone on the internet, every LinkedIn humblebrag, every casual comment in a lunch meeting. You’re comparing your internal reality to other people’s curated exteriors — and your brain can’t tell the difference.

Status anxiety

Psychologist Brad Klontz’s research on money scripts shows that many of us carry deep, often unconscious beliefs that our financial position is tied to our worth as a person. When you see a savings benchmark and feel shame — not just concern, but shame — that’s status anxiety doing its thing.

It’s not rational. But it is real. And it’s why the “just save more” advice bounces straight off.

Why standard financial advice makes this worse

Most financial advice is built on a rational-actor model: give people the right information, they make better decisions. But behavioral economics has spent fifty years demonstrating that’s not how humans work.

Galai and Sade (2006) identified what they called the ostrich effect — the tendency to avoid looking at financial information that might be painful. It’s not laziness. It’s self-protection. When checking your savings balance feels like it might confirm your worst fears about yourself, your brain quietly steers you away from looking at all.

This is why you might have a savings account you haven’t logged into in six months. Or a pension you “haven’t got round to” setting up. It’s not irresponsibility — it’s your nervous system doing its job badly in a modern context.

Standard advice says: “Face your finances head on!” And you feel a low-level dread and close the tab. Not because you’re weak. Because the advice doesn’t account for what’s actually happening neurologically.

So what’s the right number?

Here’s the honest answer from a financial planner: there isn’t one.

What matters is the direction you’re moving and the decisions you’re able to make — not an arbitrary age-based milestone calibrated for someone else’s income, someone else’s country, and someone else’s goals.

A useful reframe: instead of “how much should I have saved?” ask “what am I actually saving for, and what would make me feel safer this month?”

Those are answerable questions. They belong to you.

That said — some actual context is worth having:

Emergency fund first. Before retirement benchmarks mean anything, three months of essential expenses in an accessible account is the foundation that makes everything else possible. Not because it’s a rule. Because without it, every unexpected cost becomes a crisis that unravels longer-term saving.
Pension contributions and employer matching. If your employer matches pension contributions and you’re not taking the full match, that’s the closest thing to free money in personal finance. The exact amount matters less than making sure you’re not leaving matched contributions on the table.
The gap between “doing nothing” and “doing something” is enormous. The difference between £0 saved and £50/month saved isn’t just financial — it’s psychological. It changes your relationship with your future self.

None of those involve a specific number by a specific age.

The one thing worth doing this week

Lower the cost of looking.

Not “create a complete financial plan.” Not “face your finances.” Just make it slightly less effortful to see where you are.

That might be: log into one account you’ve been avoiding, just to see the number. Don’t do anything with it. Just look. Or check your payslip and find the pension contribution line. Or open your bank app and look at last month’s total spending — just one number, no categorisation required.

The research on the ostrich effect suggests that the anticipation of bad news is almost always worse than the news itself. Most people, when they finally look, feel relief — even if the number is lower than they hoped. Because knowing is workable. Not knowing keeps you stuck in the anxiety loop.

One look. That’s it. The rest follows.

A word on timing and life context

If you’re 30 and you spent your twenties paying off a student loan, supporting a parent, renting in London at eye-watering prices, or dealing with a mental health period that made “thinking about ISAs” genuinely impossible — you didn’t fail a benchmark. You navigated a harder track.

The savings league table doesn’t ask about your starting conditions. It never does.

Kahneman’s work on loss aversion shows we feel losses roughly twice as intensely as equivalent gains. So seeing yourself as “behind” doesn’t just feel neutral — it feels like losing. Even when you haven’t lost anything. Even when your actual position is objectively fine.

Your brain is working against you here. That’s not a character flaw. It’s just how human cognition works.

What this actually comes down to

The savings benchmark question is really a question about whether you’re okay — whether you’re safe, whether you’re accepted, whether you’re doing life right.

That’s a question worth taking seriously. But it’s not one a number can answer.

What can help is understanding the beliefs you hold about money — where they came from, how they’re shaping your decisions, and whether they’re actually serving you. Some of those beliefs are useful. Some are keeping you stuck in comparison spirals at 2am.

If you want to start understanding yours, the Money Beliefs Quiz is a good place to start. It takes about three minutes, and it’s designed to surface the patterns driving your financial behaviour — not to tell you what you’re doing wrong, but to help you understand why you do what you do.

That’s where the useful work begins.

— Joel