Retirement Savings Comparisons

[moneymaker]

This may or may not be the correct forum or maybe even a little taboo, but I haven't seen a forum on here for everyone to share their financial profiles. I have seen people share what they have, but haven't seen a consolidated forum for this. I'm interested to see how everyone's financial assets stack up and am interested in seeing how I am doing compared to others as well. In order to not get too complicated with net worth's, home equity, debt, etc. I thought it'd be reasonable to limit it to taxable and retirement/savings accounts only (401k's, IRA's, Roth's, savings, checking, etc). There are articles on yahoo, cnbc, others that talk about this information, but they are the "average" and "median" 401k balances and I really question the accuracy of them.
I'll go first:
Age: 32 (married with 2 kids, 4 and 1)
Occupation: Military (on track for a pension in 10 yrs.)
Taxable accounts: $66,753
Retirement accounts (TSP, IRA's, Roth's, wife 401k): $132,361
Total: $199,114

 

[REWahoo]

Not taboo but many of us aren't comfortable providing the details of our financial lives. Plus, since some have (or will have) pensions while others will not, the relative values of retirement accounts and taxable savings may not be meaningful for comparison purposes.

 

[Alan]

Not taboo but many of us aren't comfortable providing the details of our financial lives. Plus, since some have (or will have) pensions while others will not, the relative values of retirement accounts and taxable savings may not be meaningful for comparison purposes.

+1

Our retirement savings were only part of the equation in deciding when to retire since between the two of us we have 4 pensions, 2 SS, and 1 UK SS, plus excellent retiree Health Insurance.

 

[mrfeh]

Go over to bogleheads.org and do a search. There have been anonymous surveys done the last couple years with all this info. There are hundreds of replies, and the data placed in a spreadsheet that can be analyzed.

Warning - bogleheads are not your average person walking down the street, and the asset balances are very high.

Edited to add:
found the survey:
http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=129842&hilit=net+worth+survey

 

[engprodigy]

I'll play, I like to include home equity because if necessary proceeds from selling and downsizing would provide several years of living expenses.

These numbers exclude my wife's 401k and savings (they are much smaller though).

Age: 32 (married, Dinks)
Occupation: Engineer
Taxable: $135k
Retirement: $267k
Home Equity: $120k

 

[moneymaker]

Thanks for your participation. I understand that a few may not want to play, but I also know there are many folks on this forum that don't mind sharing, so I thought it'd be interesting to see everyone's financial profiles in one area. I also understand that the dollars you have don't equate to retiring early or not because of many variables and other avenues that people fund retirement.

 

[Alan]

If you are interested in overall wealth of members on the board you may find the following of interest, even though it is not exactly what you are after just now.

http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f28/net-worth-poll-55244.html

 

[MichaelB]

Age: Early boomer
Occupation: Retired
Taxable accounts: 25 x yearly budget
Retirement accounts <1 x yearly budget
Total: 25 x yearly budget

 

[nun]

Age: 53 (single, no kids, no mortgage, no debt)
Occupation: Retired Physicist
Taxable accounts: $350k
Retirement accounts: $750k
Annual Income: $15k rental
Pensions and SS starting at 66: $50k
Annual Expenses: $36k

 

[nash031]

I'm military, married, no kids yet thus DINK, pension 5 years away. Retirement savings is a little over 3x what you have spread between IRAs, TSP, wife 403(b), and taxable. Savings rate is about 40% of our gross income per year. About $400k equity in our house as well.

At 32, I wasn't married, but savings was pretty close to where you are now - I think I cracked $250k saved at 32 or 33. Looks like you're in good shape to me, especially considering you have kids and are probably in line to get substantial pay bumps in the next decade.

 

[Live Free]

Warning - bogleheads are not your average person walking down the street, and the asset balances are very high.

Wow. I am definitely way behind the vast majority of those folks. How depressing. I can't believe how many young people on that survey have such large net worth values. We were still living on love, and not much else, in our twenties. I'm pretty sure we had a negative net worth until about 30 yo after finally paying off DH's student loans.

 

[travelover]

Age: Old
Occupation: Professional Curmudgeon
Taxable accounts: Couple, three years of spending
Retirement accounts: Lifetime of spending
Pension: All I need, actually
Total: More than enough

Now get off my lawn.

 

[NW-Bound]

Any comparison between posters without age consideration is not really meaningful. I have assets greater than an order of magnitude than that of the OP, but I am a lot older with children of age 25 and 28. And I only stopped work 2 years ago. With some decades ahead of the OP, I have accumulated more, and that should not be surprising.

 

[jkern]

Age: 56 (retired 5 years ago)
Divorced, 22 year old daughter not living at home
Taxable: 200K
403b: 725K
Investment Property: 500K, net 25K per year rent
No pension
Home paid off
Annual cost of living: 55K

 

[FIREd]

When we were 32 year old DINKS, the total of our accounts was ~300K. Maybe half in taxable and half in retirement accounts. Occupation: scientists.

 

[Lucantes]

Age: 47 DINK (Wife is 47 also)
Occupation: IT/Communications/Electronics/Safety
Taxable: $876K
Retirement: $1,357K
Total: $2,233K
No debt
FIRE in 2017

 

[stepford]

Another problem with these surveys is a bias toward wealth. I suspect people will be more likely to share their stories of good fortune, pride in their success (and consequently high NW in retirement) than the contrary. So we'd tend to see a disproportionate fraction of folks doing very well while those a bit less proud of their circumstances might just choose to stay quiet.

Just for myself I know that, even though by most objective measures I'm doing well, after seeing a few $5M+ posts I tend to feel less like sharing details of my comparatively paltry assets.

 

[haha]

This may or may not be the correct forum or maybe even a little taboo, but I haven't seen a forum on here for everyone to share their financial profiles. I have seen people share what they have, but haven't seen a consolidated forum for this. I'm interested to see how everyone's financial assets stack up and am interested in seeing how I am doing compared to others as well. In order to not get too complicated with net worth's, home equity, debt, etc. I thought it'd be reasonable to limit it to taxable and retirement/savings accounts only (401k's, IRA's, Roth's, savings, checking, etc). There are articles on yahoo, cnbc, others that talk about this information, but they are the "average" and "median" 401k balances and I really question the accuracy of them.
I'll go first:
Age: 32 (married with 2 kids, 4 and 1)
Occupation: Military (on track for a pension in 10 yrs.)
Taxable accounts: $66,753
Retirement accounts (TSP, IRA's, Roth's, wife 401k): $132,361
Total: $199,114

Let the cat herding commence!

Ha

 

[daylatedollarshort]

Another problem with these surveys is a bias toward wealth. I suspect people will be more likely to share their stories of good fortune, pride in their success (and consequently high NW in retirement) than the contrary. So we'd tend to see a disproportionate fraction of folks doing very well while those a bit less proud of their circumstances might just choose to stay quiet.

Just for myself I know that, even though by most objective measures I'm doing well, after seeing a few $5M+ posts I tend to feel less like sharing details of my comparatively paltry assets.

I always keep in mind that the Freakonomics guys noted that on online dating sites more people reported being a lot richer, taller, blonder, less bald, skinnier, and better-looking than statistically plausible.

 

[wingfooted]

58 and DW 60, no kids
Occupation : Engineer
Taxable: $4.5MM
Retirement $0.4MM
Real Estate $1.0MM

 

[kaudrey]

Well, to compare to you, when I was 32 and divorced, I had investable assets of $231K (about 1/2 and 1/2 taxable and non-taxable). So, fast forward 13 years:

Age: 45, DH is 40 - DINKs
Occupation: Fed (will have FERS pension); DH owns his own business
Taxable accounts: $264K
Retirement accounts (TSP, IRA, DH's 401(k)): $784
Total: $1.048M
Home Equity: 400K