Planning for your retirement is an extremely complicated thing. No matter how you look at it or how well off you think you are, there are a lot of different factors that go into retirement planning, and a lot of different variables that will affect how much money you need to save for retirement.
One of those factors is the age at which you plan to retire. This can have a huge effect for a number of different reasons. First, it will determine how long you are planning to work, which can help you realize how long you will be earning income. For example, if you decide you want to work until you are 65, rather than retiring at 60, that is five more years of work and five more years of income, which will add up to a lot of money, especially if you are in a high paying field. This can help significantly boost your retirement savings, as long as you are saving a good portion of your income.
If you work longer, it will also give your investments more time to grow. When you have a large sum of money like you hopefully do for retirement, each year helps (provides you are earning money on your investments). Combined with your added investments from saving, and the longer you work, the more money you will have saved up for retirement. It’s important to figure out when you want to retire, so you can figure out how much of your income you will be saving.
Lastly, obviously your retirement age, combined with the eventual age you will live until, will show you how many years that you will have to live off of your retirement savings. If you want to retire early, then you will have to live off your savings for more years than if you would be waiting to retire. Knowing how many years you plan to live off your retirement savings will be another large factor in determining how much money you need to save, which is why retirement age is so important for retirement planning.
One of the most important variables for planning your retirement is planning at what age you want to retire. If it is later, you will have more time to earn income, more time for your investments to grow, and less time that you will need to live off of the savings. But these are all things that you must diligently plan out so that you will have enough money to retire on.