$1,000,000

Show yourself Klaymen! I’ve joined your club (on paper).

1 Like

I remember back in the '80s when Ed McMahon would tell me that winning $1M in the PCH would make me “set for life”.

when I first started working, the HR woman (old) told everyone the goal is to have 1M by the time you retire.

2 Likes

I feel mostly the same

What I couldn’t hear you over the engines of my first class ticket to Malta on the way to go dolphin watching with my good friend jaskent

2 Likes

$2 million is the new $1 million. That’s what would make me comfortable to retire, assuming no debt.

I’m debating if I should adjust my expectation based on an APV of hubby’s significant pension. Said pension didn’t exist when I came up with that number, so we probably don’t need as much now.

But our spending has increased along with our income so maybe I should keep the goal at $2 million.

No doubt. Back when I was on an entry-level salary, $1M went a lot further to fulfilling my wants and needs than my less-than-market-but-still-nothing-to-sneeze-at-ASA-salary.

adjusting for inflation, 1m in 1980 is 3.2m today

is this where we bring up minimum wage in 1980 and minimum wage now?

Yeah, Covid has helped, since we haven’t been traveling. But we will resume that at some point.

Retirement for us is in flux. We’re at the front end of a startup. So we sell in 3-5 years, but no real idea of scale. $2MM? $10MM? More? Really hard to say, though we have one direct competitor that’s already apparently raised $XXMM in startup funding. And, depends on how much of my savings I have to put into it to get it turning over, that’s been a hard drain on our retirement savings to date.

And I’ll likely still have one more startup in me after that one, and I’ve got some interesting ideas that may generate $XMM in annual subscriptions.

Or, everything goes to hell and we retire normally on our savings.

2 Likes

That is a solid goal for the employer and the employee.

I am going to be head first out the door the moment my 401K hits $1 million.

1 Like

With my current job, I have a pension that I can take at 62 without age-related decreases. If I had 1.2M in the retirement accounts (0.2M for the mortgage), I would be out the door now. My spouse receives ~25k a year in non-taxable disability income, so we’d have a very small draw to make it to 62 when the pension kicked in (only about 14k based on current service), and then an even smaller draw, because we could live easily on 40k in after tax income if the house were paid off, which it will be when I’m 57. Since I don’t have 1.2M now, I will be out the door with whatever I have at 55, and draw 50k in pension at 62 (assuming I stay at my current job until 55).

I read this the other day, so I’m hoping for earlier than 55 though. I’m past the 400k mark in the retirement accounts (not counting the pension contributions) at 10 years in. https://www.liveoffdividends.com/300k-is-half-way-to-one-million/

I would adjust your number to include the pension. Either calculate the APV, or just reduce your targeted income by the pension and go from there. Want an $80k income in retirement and the pension is $50k? You need $30k/year from your assets. Using the 4% rule you need $750k, or whatever. If there is a risk that the pension is under-funded and his benefit could be cut, factor that in… somehow.

FIRE is a frequent topic in my brain, my wife likes the idea but doesn’t think about it as often. I think our rough estimate is $3M plus no debt is about where we’d seriously contemplate never working a day we didn’t want to work. My savings rate (total savings / total after-tax income) was just north of 50% before we started home renovations, it’s closer to 40% now, but that is adding up fairly quickly.

How many years have you been saving 40-50% for. I save at a similar rate

Cool, we can stop saving then!

But we probably won’t. What else are we going to do with the money? Plus if they cut it off… the present value of accrued benefits is a lot less than the present value of expected future benefits. So I should probably only reduce it by the former, not the latter.

He is vested now, so at least we’re guaranteed to get something. But he hasn’t been there a ton of years yet. So while we anticipate that the pension will ultimately be worth a lot… we could still [partially] lose this deal.

Also the pension has no COLA. The maximum pensionable earnings keeps going up with inflation, so the amount we’ll get when he retires goes up with inflation. But then it will stay the same.

I sort of ignore inflation in my calculations, assuming that my income-producing assets will increase enough to offset the inflation. But I have to tweak the pension for inflation because once we start drawing it… the amount is fixed.

Geez, I might have to pull out my Actuarial Mathematics book for this. :grimacing:

I don’t know how ordinary people plan. :woman_shrugging:

When I was a young man, I thought I’d be ready for retirement once I hit $2M. I later decided I would not be comfortable at that level, largely due to prolonged low interest rates and stock market volatility.

Yeah, our spending is up but at this point I’m targeting $2 million plus the generous pension. So I think that will be plenty.

Heck if our mortgage is paid off, which it will be, I think the pension alone would be sufficient. The other savings is more for one-time expenditures like buying a new car for cash, and a “just in case something happens to the pension” fund.

$2 million at 4% is $80,000 a year, plus Social Security. That’s fine when you’re healthy but might not be fine if you need long term care.

3 years so far over 40%. Went years saving 15% or so because that was the conventional wisdom or whatever. Ramped up starting in 2012 or so, and then got really serious in January of 2018.

1 Like