What do you consider 'comfortable for retirement '?

broncosbybart

broncosbybart

Is it 5 YET?
Joined
May 15, 2008
Location
Charlotte, NC
The other thread got me thinking about saving money and retirement. What's your views on it?

We probably have 25-30 more years to save. Right now we only have around $150k saved but the house is paid for (figure around $250k). I have no idea how much it will take to live and pay bills/health care by the time we are old enough to retire. Right now we save around 15k/yr in 401k funds. So, we won't be loaded but I don't know if we need to try and kick it up more somehow.

You don't have to get personal with your finances but I'm curious to see what others think about it, if there's such a thing as a magic number- setting aside the uncertainty of dying, N Korea, hyperinflation, mad max syndrome, etc. for all the prepper types. Not sure how social security will pan out and we won't have any sort of pension, so it will be up to us to live off of savings.
 
My best guess, if I had to figure what to have in 25-30 years (you are talking 2042-2047), I'd say a minimum of 2.5 to 3 million to be "comfortable" during your retirement. Maybe double that if you want to leave something to the kids, vs. pretty well eating away your principal before you kick off. Figure 3 percent inflation per year. Don't count on Social Security even being there in 30 years.

VERY ROUGH calculation....if you continue to put in 15k a year in todays dollars (increasing each year by that 3% average inflation), and if your portfolio averages 6% (the number I use, relatively safe assumption I think in todays market), then you should come out right about 2.5 million. Again, if you want to leave a legacy for the kids, charities, etc....double up that contribution....or just hope the market does better than the 6%.
 
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One thing I will say, too.....there are a lot of young folks here that need to hear this at every opportunity: There is one thing you can't buy, and that is TIME. Start investing early, and regularly, and it will grow over time....starting to save in earnest for retirement at 20 is much, much better than trying to play catch-up at 40. Or almost impossible at 50+.
 
I'm 40 years old. With my life style I hope to have good health til I'm 50. Between 50-60 I figure my health will decline quite a bit but hopefully not too bad. I plan to retire by sixty and hopefully really enjoy life til I'm seventy. After seventy I figure I really won't give a shito_O
So if I have enough retirement for a good comfortable 10 to 15 years I'll be good. I figure 100-125k a year will still be comfortable money in twenty years so around 1.5 million should be alright. But I may be wrong without really running numbers.
If I run out of money I'm hoping my investment in my kids will kick in:rockon:
 
If everything is paid for (no mortgage or any other debt) it is MUCH easier to retire. You're definitely on the right track with not mortgage and $150k nest egg at your age. Continue to contribute and increase those contributions with annual raises and you will have nothing to worry about. At all...

kaiser715 said:
One thing I will say, too.....there are a lot of young folks here that need to hear this at every opportunity: There is one thing you can't buy, and that is TIME. Start investing early, and regularly, and it will grow over time....starting to save in earnest for retirement at 20 is much, much better than trying to play catch-up at 40. Or almost impossible at 50+.
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This will be the truest thing in this thread! Save early and save often! Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world and will make a HUGE difference when it comes to retirement.
 
Sounds like you are doing better than the majority of Merica. From a numbers perspective, it doesn’t really make sense to prioritize paying off a mortgage over investments (especially in tax sheltered accounts) with the mortgage rates being as low as they have been for the past 10+ years. However, emotionally I bet it feels pretty dang good.
 
kaiser715 said:
My best guess, if I had to figure what to have in 25-30 years (you are talking 2042-2047), I'd say a minimum of 2.5 to 3 million to be "comfortable" during your retirement. Maybe double that if you want to leave something to the kids, vs. pretty well eating away your principal before you kick off.
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Don't discount life insurance! We all plan for retirement to some degree but what about the plan for when we die?

I have pretty good life insurance so the family is still taken care of if something ever happens to me. If I some how make it through retirement without croaking early (or someone strangling me... :lol: ) then the life insurance can be for the kids and grand kids. :D


Aside from having enough $ to do what you want in retirement, one must consider the expense of a nursing home. Medicaid nursing homes SUCK! The facility sucks. The food sucks. The staff sucks. The care sucks. Bri sees this everyday and deals with shitty staff and facilities with her job. My biggest motivator to have enough $ in my old age is so I don't have to rely on Medicaid supported nursing homes and have enough $ to go to a decent place that isn't miserable. That's he last thing I want, is to be miserable in my last days of life.
 
As I get older, I'm beginning to think about aging and health care, as you alluded to Rob. We don't have kids, so no real life insurance needs. We both have term policies that will expire around retirement age, and we will just self insure from there.

I never saved, so most of this is relatively new to me. I never overspent, just spent it all on tools, cars, bikes, etc. So, we have no debt but very little savings compared to where we probably should be.

Are you guys all just using the market for your investments? I don't really like not having control of it. The Roth 401's we have will be in it for the duration- good or bad. I'm really considering commercial real estate as it is more concrete (in my mind) but might not have the return that the market may or may not yield.

I can't forsee health care costs, but at the rate it's going, it is worrisome
 
kaiser715 said:
One thing I will say, too.....there are a lot of young folks here that need to hear this at every opportunity: There is one thing you can't buy, and that is TIME. Start investing early, and regularly, and it will grow over time....starting to save in earnest for retirement at 20 is much, much better than trying to play catch-up at 40. Or almost impossible at 50+.
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From what I recall off the top of my head, for every $1 put into 401k during your late 20s, and with the average growth of 8% per year, you can expect it to turn into $33 by retirement. That may not be precise, but shows the point to be made. Save early and be diverse with your investments. Real estate, precious metals, stock market, etc.

When real estate tanked, the stock market followed, but the precious metals prices went up. So cover your bases to mitigate any potential losses.

Personally, I'm aiming for a cool million in 401k, house and land paid for, and enough gold and silver to leave my kids a treasure chest. (And it will be, I'm gonna bury it and leave them a map with an X on it)
 
Atla said:
lol, there are other options. Apmex uses a company called Citadel, so you can buy it from them and have it stored there. Several other online companies offer the same services. :)

Here's a quick little read on why you should... with pictures!

Why Buying Physical Gold is a Smart Investment to Protect Wealth | How to Buy Physical Gold Online
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Precious metals I get. The risky part is burrying it in a treasure chest and relying on someone else to follow a map and understand the directions enough to find it and hope the dog doesn't eat the dang map or its lost forever! :lol:
 
I am about to turn 44, and my wife turned 40 earlier this year. We are planning on waiting until we have $5 million before retirement. Tomorrow is not guaranteed, but I have a lot of relatives in my family tree who lived to be VERY old. Both of my grandfathers died in their 90's (93 and 94 I think). I have a photo of one relative who was 102 yrs old sitting on the front porch when the photo was taken. I am extremely healthy, so might live to be very old and I don't want to come up short on funds in my 80's, 90's, or 100's. I also don't want things to get tight in the event of an economic collapse like what happened in 2008-2009, or worse like the great depression. I saw two of my father's friends get hit by the tech crash of the stock market in 2001. One of them had to come out of retirement, and the other had to delay retirement many years. They were both too caught up in the tech stock frenzy of the late 90's, and were not diversified enough with their investment portfolio's. My wife and I have both been contributing the maximum federally allowed amount to our 401k plans for many years, and those accounts have grown tremendously. We also save additional funds monthly in an E-trade investment account. I plan to start moving stuff to less risky investments as we get closer to retirement.
 
I try to save as much as I can and put it in stocks and my retirement accounts, etc. But I keep finding things that can net a return greater than what my investment accounts are returning. So, aside from my 401k and IRAs, the investment accounts have recently acted as a holding account until I find something more lucrative for that $.

Im surprised my financial advisor hasn't fired me yet. :flipoff2:
 
rockcity said:
Aside from having enough $ to do what you want in retirement, one must consider the expense of a nursing home. Medicaid nursing homes SUCK! The facility sucks. The food sucks. The staff sucks. The care sucks. Bri sees this everyday and deals with shitty staff and facilities with her job. My biggest motivator to have enough $ in my old age is so I don't have to rely on Medicaid supported nursing homes and have enough $ to go to a decent place that isn't miserable. That's he last thing I want, is to be miserable in my last days of life.
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This is the biggest reason I want to wait until we have a large sum of money before retiring. GOOD retirement homes/communities are VERY expensive. Prolonged illness for many years can wipe out tremendous amounts of money. My parents are 77 and 82 and are investigating them heavily now. They have put down deposits at two of them. Most of them require you to be able to walk in. If you wait until you are too old and cannot walk in on your own, then you are DENIED. One of them costs $350k to enter. You don't get that money back either. That is your 'ticket' price in the door. Then you pay monthly fees on top of that which are not cheap.

My wife did some rotations at nursing homes while working on her bachelors degree in nursing. She said the conditions in many places is AWFUL! Old people who cannot get out of bed without assistance are left there to pee on themselves. Then the help/nurses don't even change the sheets. They just stuff a couple of towels under the old person and leave. She also saw help/nurses slap some of the old people across the face. Yes, physical abuse happens at some of those places.

Another thought is what if you retire and 20 yrs later you are getting low on funds. Who is going to hire you then other than Wal Mart to be a greeter?
 
drkelly said:
This is the biggest reason I want to wait until we have a large sum of money before retiring. GOOD retirement homes/communities are VERY expensive. Prolonged illness for many years can wipe out tremendous amounts of money. My parents are 77 and 82 and are investigating them heavily now. They have put down deposits at two of them. Most of them require you to be able to walk in. If you wait until you are too old and cannot walk in on your own, then you are DENIED. One of them costs $350k to enter. You don't get that money back either. That is your 'ticket' price in the door. Then you pay monthly fees on top of that which are not cheap.

My wife did some rotations at nursing homes while working on her bachelors degree in nursing. She said the conditions in many places is AWFUL! Old people who cannot get out of bed without assistance are left there to pee on themselves. Then the help/nurses don't even change the sheets. They just stuff a couple of towels under the old person and leave. She also saw help/nurses slap some of the old people across the face. Yes, physical abuse happens at some of those places.

Another thought is what if you retire and 20 yrs later you are getting low on funds. Who is going to hire you then other than Wal Mart to be a greeter?
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I have a customer who is a 3rd gen business owner and probably the cheapest dude Ive ever met.
His dad is late 80s...mom passed recently. Dad needs help to care for himself. They looked at a few homes and he said the cost was going to exceed $150k/yr. Not sure how normal that is I havent investigated these.
He says they are hiring 2 nurses at $75k/yr to rotate 12 hour shifts. Living at his dad's house and providing care. Said dad stays in his home. Nurses make as much or more than what they would and have a much less stressful job and he gets direct concentrated care.

I thought it was in interesting thought.
 
I don't know what the exact number would be in todays market, but I loved how my grandmother spent her last days:

Starts way back just after WWII when my uncle Bob left the Army and moved back home with my grandma and grandpa (on my mother's side). My grandpa was always in poor health, so he knew that he would eventually have to take care of him and her, so he never moved back out or married. He invested every cent he got from the Army in the stock market and did very well. He always had a car that he could drive my grandma around in after grandpa died in 74. Uncle Bob died in 1984, leaving his investments to her (he never worked a day after the Army, just invested). He left her a half million dollar stock portfolio. She lived in her home which was paid for until she fell and broke her hip, having to move to a Convalescent Home. My father took over her finances and the other uncles were very upset that an in-law would be handling her money instead of one of her sons or daughter. She stayed in a 3000 a month home that included her meals. They had a beauty salon inside the home and she would always keep cash on hand to get her hair done, give tips and take people out to eat if she wanted. The nurses took exceptional care of her up until she passed away in 1994 at the ripe age of 100.

When she died, her stock portfolio was dissolved and was right near half a million. My dad had managed the funds the way he would have if they were his and managed to have her live purely off interest, dividend income and occasional liquidation of stocks.

My uncles were upset that he was given an equal split when she died, essentially making it a 50/25/25 split instead of a 33/33/33 split. My dad simply asked what they would have done with the funds in 1984 when Uncle Bob died. Their answer was to sell it all and put it in the bank. He did some quick calculations in Excel and showed them that at the rate she was spending, she would have been bankrupt two years prior. So, instead of getting 33% of nothing, they were getting 25% of a half mill. Not too shabby, even for 1994.
 
WARRIORWELDING said:
from your guys prospective...I'm absolutely fucked. All I got.
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I'm paranoid of not having enough money in case I live to be over 100. My number is surely way more than we will need. I will probably get old, tired of working, and give up before reaching our goal.

There are retirement calculators online that are fun to play with.
 
lockedup5 said:
Yeah before I cost my family 150k a year to have my ass wiped I'll just off myself. Me being on this Earth just isn't worth my wife and kids suffering in the long run.
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Couldn't live without mine and her vice versa

We have a "Thelma & Louise" pact if either of us get close to that. Of course I coughed and farted at the same time the other day and had to check my 6 to see if she was there with a gat ready to bust a cap in my ass
 
lockedup5 said:
Yeah before I cost my family 150k a year to have my ass wiped I'll just off myself. Me being on this Earth just isn't worth my wife and kids suffering in the long run.
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I work in EMS and I'm in and out of nursing homes often. This is my point of view from doing what I do. Most of the time it is the family that can't let go. A huge portion of the people we interact with do not have a DNR or MOST form (which is the only thing that is legally reckonized in emergencies.) I wish we had phycisan assisted suicide in NC.

But if you want a true look at what a nursing home looks like. Go in very early in the morning 5-7 am. Most SNFs (skilled nursing facilities) have very little or not enough staff on hand to deal with the number of patients they have.

Another poster said something about hiring in home care and that is the ticket. IMHO hiring an RN is overkill. No need to have (to pay) one, LPN, CNA, or even a med tech should be plenty.

My plan for my mother, if all cards fall in my favor, is to have property with 3 residences. One for my family, one for my mother, and one for a nanny/elderly care person. Where housing for them and family is apart of the compensation package. I'll just have to see if I can make all that work out.
 
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