Oops! A Surprising Factor Retirees Forget to Plan for

You’ve saved, budgeted, worked with a financial adviser, managed your taxes, optimized your Social Security benefits, and checked off all the other major planning boxes. It might feel like the only thing left to do in your retirement planning is to actually retire. But there’s one thing you probably forgot to account for in all your plans — and it’s something that has nothing to do with your finances at all.

That crucial variable that you might forget to plug into all your retirement planning calculations and projections is not overly complicated, but missing it cause all that careful planning you’ve done for decades to go out the window. What is this mysterious X factor? It’s change. Specifically, it’s the fact that you change.