5 ways to save money in retirement

With retirement, you're dealing with a phase of your financial life where you have a limited amount of money and no concrete idea of how long it must last. With finite resources, you must be mindful of your spending so you won't outlive your money and so you'll have the funds for the things most important to you.

"By the time people are ready to retire, or have already retired, they should have a very current picture of what their spending is," says Tim Kober, a certified financial planner with Cedar Financial Advisors in Portland, Ore. "There's the problem of spending going up in the initial part of retirement when people do all the deferred things that they've been wanting to, and it's important that they don't overdraw their nest egg to make all those nice things happen."

Retirement has many stages, and not every stage is one where you'll want to splurge. But it's important to realize that you may spend more initially, and budget accordingly. As you get things like the travel bug out of your system, spending may go down. But other expenses, like health care, may increase.