No one wants to spend their retirement bagging groceries, but without sufficient retirement savings, that’s how you may be spending your golden years. The latest Merrill Lynch Finances in Retirement Survey, released in March 2017, revealed that the average cost of retirement has risen to $738,400. Of that number, $260,000 will go to healthcare costs alone, according to Fidelity’s Retiree Health Care Cost Estimate. But $738,400 is just an average — retirees accustomed to high incomes may need even more than this to maintain their standard of living in retirement.