Tracking your expenditures for several months as you get closer to retirement will help you get a better handle on what you might need — particularly if you consider such factors as whether you plan to travel more, or whether your car will need to be replaced once you retire.

Then there’s Social Security. Trusting what the Social Security website predicts you’ll receive can be a dicey proposition, it said, pointing to the projection that the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2034. By how much might that reduce your benefits, and how much are you counting on them?

Pensions might not be such a sure thing, either, since many companies are freezing pension plans — and if you can’t stay with your employer long enough to be vested, that will affect what you might be able to draw on, too.

Oh, and if you’re planning on a job during retirement, you might want to rethink that as a sure thing; 48 percent of retirees who want to work aren’t; 35 percent are unemployed for health reasons, 5 percent provide care to a loved one and 8 percent just couldn’t find work. Even if you plan to work till age 65, you might not be able to, either due to ill health or because your job just disappeared. That means you’ll have less time to save and more time to spend.

Then there’s the good news: You might live longer. The bad news: You might outlive your savings.

People have a 50 percent chance of living longer than the “average” life expectancy used to calculate how much money they’ll need in retirement, which sounds great until you realize you’ll be broke in your final years.

Then there are those pesky issues around your investments: expected return (usually estimated high) and confusing investment returns with income. In the former case, projections of 7 percent to 10 percent returns are likely way too optimistic, given low interest rates, market volatility and other factors. An estimate of less than 5 percent annually would be more realistic. Even if you make that 5 percent, though, that doesn’t mean you can take the whole 5 percent out every year. Doing so could deplete the principal, which could run you out of money sooner rather than later.