Episode 42: How Much Do You Really Need to Save for Retirement?

In this episode, Brett shares his rules of thumb for determining how much to save for retirement at any age based on your future lifestyle goals.

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear me say that some of us don’t like to think about our money, or our finances, or savings all that much. Mostly when we do think about them, we’re simply telling ourselves not to worry about it.

The problem, though, is that we do worry about it. Don’t we? 

But really, the question we’re trying to answer when we worry about money is, “Am I okay?” 

It’s the same thing as when you go to a doctor and ask, “What in the world is this? What is this bump on my arm?” You want the answer to that. But what you really want is for the doctor to say that you’re okay.

So, we have this neat way of doing things like this as humans. And in my profession as a financial planner, I hear it every day from my entrepreneur clients when it comes to their retirement savings. Rather than giving them a whole lot of numbers, they just want to know, “Am I okay? Will I have enough?” Any of these thoughts sound familiar to you?

Today I want to talk about saving for retirement—how much to save, and where you are on that journey. 

Because as we get older, of course, you want to have more saved as you get closer to your retirement date. But today, I’m going to give you some tangible numbers, some averages, of how much to save for retirement relative to your age and lifestyle goals.