I work in a trade industry, make $23 an hour (~$44k annual on a 40 hour work week), and put 10% of this base income into my 401k (this does not include the ~$16k I make in overtime). I also currently have ~$4k invested in this plan. In addition, I'm 25 years old and bought a house last month ($670 in fixed monthly payments).
I used an online calculator to determine what my 401k will look like in forty years time, and was dismayed to see it projected to yield ~$1,300,000 by the time of my retirement. This seems high, but when I used another online calculator to determine what $1mil was worth in 1975 by today's standards, there was a nearly 4x difference. Wouldn't that theoretically mean my projected $1,300,000 in retirement savings will only be worth $325,000 by today's standards? In that case, I could only last around eight years without working at my current standard of living until I'm flat broke. And that's assuming I don't have kids, a dependent spouse, and have paid off my house at that age.
Someone please teach me how wrong I am, because this is seriously depressing to think about.
Submitted June 22, 2018 at 09:51AM by black_moot https://ift.tt/2tvUKsR
