What financial habits have helped you most in life?

Which ones have held you back?

No matter how you answer those questions, your money habits have a lot to do with how you grew up.¹

They also can be shaped by when you grew up.

When are you going to retire?

How did you make that decision?

Many of us look at finances and health when we’re deciding when to retire.

Whether or not we realize it, we’re also considering our emotions and what we imagine for the future — we compare how we feel in our current circumstances to how we expect to feel in our anticipated retirement.¹

With that, we tend to overestimate our future emotions, thinking we’ll be a lot happier as retirees.¹

And that can motivate short-sighted decisions that lead to more regrets than satisfaction in retirement.¹

To avoid that and make better decisions about retiring, let’s look at some of the leading retiree regrets, what’s behind them, and what you can do now to set yourself up for a dream retirement later.

Retirement Regret #1. Retiring Too Early

Retiring as soon as possible can be a priority, but retiring too early can be a big mistake. For one, premature retirement can mean gambling with your financial security in the future. If you leave work too early, you could be forfeiting some key, higher-earning years to build up your savings.

How many of your financial choices are based purely on logic?

It could be fewer than you think.

That’s because most of us make money decisions with our emotions in play.¹

With that, certain biases can follow. When they do, those biases can lead even the smartest, best-intentioned investors astray.

Here’s how to recognize three common biases - hindsight bias, fear of missing out (FOMO), and survivorship bias - and avoid their traps.

The Allure of High-Performing Stocks

Over the past two decades, companies like Amazon, Apple, and Tesla have become household names, largely due to their staggering market success. Investors who bought into these companies early and held on saw incredible returns. That can make it tempting to look at these success stories and think, if only I had invested back then…

This mindset is typically fueled by hindsight bias, a way of thinking that can mislead us into seeing past events as more predictable than they actually were at the time. With that, we tend to sideline or even forget the uncertainty, risks, and competing narratives that existed back when those decisions had to be made.