I am doing this an exercise and I posted earlier from the wrong account.
So its a new year and I have just been going over all my finances and setting budgets. I recently got married and we have been working on making plans for the future. We are currently saving up to buy a house and putting my wife through 2 years of Dental School so that she can be an accredited Dentist in the US. We got to discussing about retirement and how much income we would really need in Retirement. I currently have a steady job and make a good salary. I take home roughly $4,000/mo after putting away 12% in 401k(company matches 6%), maxing out my HSA, and we usually get close to maxing out our IRA account.
I ran some numbers and even if I had not saved any money currently, I would need to put away $8,500 into a retirement account for the next 35 years assuming 5% rate of return in order to have an income of 65k a year for 20 years in retirement. I have figured that even if I purchase a home, I will have that paid off in 30 years. Outside of a mortgage, I cannot foresee having a ton of expenses in retirement that I could not handle with a 65-70k income. Am I wrong in this line of thinking? Of course I can be overlooking some expenses like medical/etc but I cant imagine I could not cover it in that sort of income. My thought process is that if I cut down my 401k to just 6%, still max the HSA and continue to only put in 6k into the IRA, I would be putting roughly 19k into retirement accounts. Should that not account for any room of error or market downturn? Again, just doing this as an exercise to get a different viewpoint from other people. Also, I have just been going in thinking about things with just my income as the only source and not my wife's future income.
Submitted January 11, 2019 at 09:09AM by FancyBrownie http://bit.ly/2H8oPZz
