August 2026 - Financial Insights Newsletter

By Genti Cici, CFP®, CAIA  •  August 1, 2026

What Is the Money For?

On saving, investing, and the question we skip

There's a conversation that repeats itself across my table. A prospect sits down, sometimes a client I've known for years, and I ask the simplest question in this business: what is this money actually for? The most common answer, by far: "to make more money."

Push a little and the answers stay vague. Grow it. Be safe. Have more. So we slow down and probe: if money were solved tomorrow, what changes? And here's the part that still surprises me: for many people, the question has never crossed their mind. Decades of earning, saving, and investing, and the destination was never chosen.

For years I assumed I was meeting the exceptions. The data says I'm meeting the norm. Two numbers make the point.

The first: 67 percent of Americans now say they worry more about running out of money than about death. Not illness. Not loneliness. Death itself loses to the fear of an empty account. That figure comes from Allianz's 2026 retirement study, and it is a record high, up from 57 percent just four years ago.

The second: roughly 20 years into retirement, about a third of retirees still have 100 percent or more of the assets they retired with. In one large study tracking households over two decades of retirement, the typical middle-wealth household had spent down less than a third of its savings. Many people die never having touched the principal.

Hold those two facts next to each other. We are more afraid of running out of money than of dying, and at the same time, a huge share of us die with the money still sitting there, unspent. Same people. Same money. Both problems.

I don't think that's a math failure. I think it's a definition failure. Somewhere along the way, we never answered the only question that matters: what is the money for?

Money is a middleman

Here's the thing we all know and constantly forget: money is made up. It's an invention, a brilliant one, that sits between what we can produce and what we need and want. I do work, the work becomes dollars, the dollars become groceries, a home, a flight to see my parents, a daughter's education, a cause I care about.

Money is the bridge between those two shores. And saying "my goal is more money" is like saying "my goal is more bridge." A bridge to where? Nobody builds a bridge for the bridge's sake. The destination is the point. The bridge just makes it possible.

Yet listen to how we talk about saving and investing. Hit the number. Grow the portfolio. Beat the market. More. The money stopped being the middleman and quietly took center stage, and the actual goals, the life the money was supposed to buy, got moved to the back seat.

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Why the swap happens

I don't think people are shallow for falling into this. There's a mechanical reason it happens: money is the only part of your life plan with a scoreboard.

"A better life" has no balance you can check. "More time with my kids" doesn't send a monthly statement. "Doing work I'm proud of" never flashes green or red. But your account balance updates every single day, to the penny. So the thing that's measurable slowly replaces the thing that matters. We optimize what we can see.

That's not a moral failure. It's a measurement failure. And it has a cost on both ends of life.

While we're working, the hyperfocus on the number crowds out the question of what the number is for. And in retirement, it turns cruel: if you never defined "enough," then no amount ever feels safe. That's how you get people with more than they will ever spend, still anxious, still deferring the trip, the gift, the generosity, waiting for a feeling of safety that a bigger balance cannot deliver. The fear of running out stays high precisely because "out of what, for what" was never written down.

What the research actually says

To be clear, this is not a "money doesn't matter" sermon. It matters a lot. In 2023, two researchers who had famously disagreed about money and happiness, Daniel Kahneman and Matthew Killingsworth, ran a joint study to settle it. Their finding: for most people, well-being does keep rising with income. But the reason it rises is what money enables: security, options, time, the ability to help people you love. For people who are already unhappy, more money stops helping at all past a point. Money buys well-being the way fuel buys a road trip. It's essential, and it's still not the trip.

The fix is embarrassingly simple

Only about a third of Americans have ever written down what their money is actually for. In Schwab's latest wealth survey, 33 percent had a documented financial plan, and the difference showed: 74 percent of planners felt financially comfortable or on track, versus 48 percent of everyone else. Not because writing a plan changes the market. Because it defines "enough," and "enough" is what calm is made of.

So here's the exercise I'd put in front of anyone, and it costs nothing:

Write down your actual goals. Not "retire comfortably." The real ones. The place you want to wake up. The people you want to spend your days with. The work you'd do if income were solved. The help you want to give.

Then, for each one, ask three questions. What does this cost? When do I want it? And what part of it does money actually solve? You'll find some goals need less money than you feared, and some need none at all.

That last step matters most: give the money a job description. Money with a job has a finish line. Money without one just accumulates, along with the worry.

Saving and investing are still the engine, and I'd never talk anyone out of them. But an engine needs a destination. Because nobody, at the end of it all, ever wished they'd died with a fuller tank.

This month, try writing the answer to one question: what is my money for? Everything else in your financial life gets easier once that sentence exists.

As always, if you want to talk through any of this, our door is open.

Genti Cici, CFP®, CAIA

Sources: Allianz Life 2026 Annual Retirement Study; EBRI, Asset Decumulation Over Retirement; Kahneman & Killingsworth, PNAS (2023); Charles Schwab Modern Wealth Survey 2025.