Investors say they’ll need an average of $2.5 million to retire, if they’re going to have the same quality of life they have now while working.

According to a Legg Mason survey released Monday, those numbers are not only investors’ goal, but the ones that keep them up at night.

Seventy-two percent of investors say that their primary investing goal is to “maintain my current lifestyle later in life,” but 38 percent say they’re not doing all that well at achieving that goal, or, at best, only “somewhat well.”

Six out of 10 said they were not confident or only “somewhat confident” about their ability to retire “at the age I want to,” leaving just 40 percent saying they were confident in being able to do so.

A natural consequence of such a high goal and such a low perceived success rate is the number of hours people spend worrying about money.

The average amount of time investors said they devote to financial worries is an hour and 20 minutes every single day. That totals more than a full workday each week — nine hours — and adds up to 475 hours a year.

That’s just shy of 60 eight-hour days, folks. What could you do with that kind of time if you weren’t worrying?

Oh, and 10 percent of investors do a lot more even than that: they spend two to three hours each day thinking or worrying about money. That adds up to between 730–1,095 hours a year.

The top three catastrophes to prevent them living the lifestyle they want, the ones that occupy people’s darker thoughts during all this worrying time, are a catastrophic event, such as illness or injury, that uses up their retirement funds; outliving the money they’ve saved; and finding that their income won’t keep up with inflation.

That last seems to be spurring people to seek income-producing investments, such as the equity income funds, investment grade bonds and high-yield bonds previously reported by Legg Mason as the choices of 80 percent of investors.

Not that it seems to be doing them a whole lot of good — at least among the respondents to this latest survey.

Their average age was 58, and among the 70 percent of respondents who have a defined contribution plan, the average amount saved was just $385,000.

Considering the gap between that and the $2.5 million they say they’ll need, 72 percent of respondents said they were happy to sacrifice now to have enough money later.

Forty-two percent said they expect to cut back on their lifestyle in retirement so that they don’t outlive their money, while 31 percent acknowledged that they’ll need more money but are too afraid of investment risk to gamble on increasing what they already have.

Thirty percent said they could save more but don’t — how human! — and 26 percent admitted they have more debt than they should.

And, finally, more than a fifth of affluent investors are living beyond their means: 21 percent said that if they lost their jobs today, they’d have a rough go trying to pay their bills six months down the road.

The Legg Mason Global Investment Survey queried 458 investors with a minimum of $200,000 in investable assets not including their home. The online survey was conducted by Northstar Research Partners between November and January.

Instant Insights /

To retire comfortably, Americans say they&rsquo;ll need $2.5 million

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To retire comfortably, Americans say they’ll need $2.5 million