How Much You Need To Retire Rich in 3 Big Arizona Cities

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Saving enough money for retirement can be a tricky proposition, as it involves a number of variables that can’t be estimated with any degree of certainty. For example, even if you invest in the stock market, which has a long-term average return of about 10% annually, there’s no way to really know what return you will earn. Similarly, while you can estimate your life expectancy based on your family history and your own personal health, there’s no real way of knowing whether you will die in 30 years or tomorrow. 

Where you live is another variable that can greatly impact how long your retirement savings will last. If you’re a resident of Arizona, for example, your money can stretch fairly far in some of the state’s smaller cities but won’t last nearly as long in the “big three” cities that have populations of 500,000 or more. Here’s a look at how much you need to retire rich for 20, 25 and 30 years in the state’s three biggest cities, Mesa, Phoenix and Tucson. 

Mesa

• Savings needed for 20 years of retiring rich: $1,693,391
• Savings needed for 25 years of retiring rich: $2,116,739
• Savings needed for 30 years of retiring rich: $2,542,629

Mesa is its own city, but it’s located in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area. Like its larger sibling, Mesa has a high cost of living — about 13% above the national average. Things are even worse in the housing department, where costs run closer to 21% above national norms. With an annual cost of living of $65,334.34, you’ll need more than $2 million to retire “rich” for 25 years and more than $2.5 million for 30 years. 

Phoenix

• Savings needed for 20 years of retiring rich: $1,693,391
• Savings needed for 25 years of retiring rich: $2,116,739
• Savings needed for 30 years of retiring rich: $2,542,629

Phoenix is the top dog when it comes to Arizona cities, with a population more than three times as large as Tucson’s 545,975. But if you want to retire there for even 20 years, you’ll need much more than the mythical “$1 million” that’s often tossed about as a retirement savings goal. In fact, according to the data, the absolute minimum that you’d need to retire for 20 years in Phoenix is $846,696. That’s still a hefty sum when the average American has only $88,400 in retirement savings, according to a study by Northwestern Mutual.

Because Phoenix and Mesa have the same cost of living, the savings needed to retire wealthy are the same in both cities. However, housing is a bit cheaper in Phoenix, whereas transportation and utilities are cheaper in Mesa.

Tucson

• Savings needed for 20 years of retiring rich: $1,323,356
• Savings needed for 25 years of retiring rich: $1,654,195
• Savings needed for 30 years of retiring rich: $1,987,021

Tucson has only one-third the population of Phoenix, and some find it a more manageable city in which to live. It also has the added bonus of having a lower cost of living, which can make retirement savings stretch much further. A 20-year retirement in Tucson, for example, costs about 22% less than it does in Phoenix, translating to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In fact, the minimum amount required for a 20-year retirement in Tucson requires “just” $661,678. But if you end up living 30 years in retirement, you’ll essentially need a minimum of about $1 million — and double that for a “rich” retirement.

In Arizona’s biggest cities, you can actually enjoy a happy retirement on just around $1 million, the figure that many Americans use as their retirement savings target. But if you want to “retire rich” in Arizona’s three big cities, you’ll have to bump up your goal a bit. In the case of Phoenix and Mesa, you’ll need more than $2.5 million to support a “rich” lifestyle for 30 years. 

Methodology: In order to find out exactly how much you need to retire in some of America’s biggest cities, GOBankingRates found the annual cost of expenditures for a retired person in each city by multiplying the 65 year and older expenditures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2022 Consumer Expenditure Survey by the cost of living index for each city from Sperling’s BestPlaces. To find how much money a retired person would need to save, we divided each city’s annual expenditures, minus the annual Social Security income as sourced from the Social Security Administration’s Monthly Statistical Snapshot, May 2024, by 0.0333%, 0.04% and 0.05% — assuming 20, 25 and 30 years of retirement respectively. To determine how much one would need to retire rich, GOBankingRates took the 20-, 25- and 30-year minimums and doubled those amounts. All data is collected and is up to date as of June 17, 2024.

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