I'd recommend testing anything a financial advisor tells you against advice in these forums and the Boglehead forums before you pull the trigger. That way you can make the most informed decision.
Hi Phish, the above is excellent advice. If you do find a fee only financial adviser, post his thoughts here, and people will give you their honest feedback.
Here are some thoughts, now that I have gotten some more information
1. Track your spending, it is easy to get life style creep, because you feel like you deserve it. Tracking your spend is an extremely valuable exercise.
a. It will let you know how much you need to retire
b. It gives you the opportunity to choose what you want to spend your money on. It doesn't mean that you have to go on a budget of spending only $30k a year, it gives you the facts and it gives you the choice of spending $50k on vacation or $200k on a fancy car or choose not to spend to get out earlier. If I had your high compensation, I would certainly spend more money than I do now, because I would be deserving it...
At this point, you pay about $100k in taxes each year. If you have living expenses of $150k, then your current total expenses is $250k and your savings is $150k.
In retirement you would only need ~$210k to sustain the same standard of living as your taxes drop, and you no longer need to save. If you assume you'll live to 90 years old, you'd want to have 30x210=$6.3M
To clarify some things, I have not been making this type of money for very long, about 4 years, and before that made about 200k for about four years. Paid off about 250k total for myself and husbands student loans (long Ph D program for myself) We have two homes, primary home worth 500k, owe 200k, vacation/retirement home worth 650k, paid off. The reason I am posting this now is that we have been focusing on paying off student loans and our vacation place and had the goal to pay it off by the time I turned 40, which we just did.
If I read you correctly, you have been able to save $1.4M over the last eight years. I imagine that most of that would have been over the last four years as you more than doubled your take home. If you keep that up, you will have a very good chance of hitting your target.
The following is a very simplistic back of the envelope calculation which might not hold up for a short time horizon like 10 years...
The power of compounding is fantastic...
The rule of 72 is the rule of doubling. Divide 72 by your annual return on investment and it will give you the doubling time. ie, return of 8% doubles your money in 9 years without contributing any to it, return of 4% doubles it in 18 years... If you assume 7.2% return (not conservative) your money will double in 10 years.
In 20 years, your 401k will be $2M, without contributing another dime...
If you can save another $1.5M in the next 10 years and allow that to grow at 7.2% between 50 and 60, you'd have $3M from those savings.
Putting away another $1.5M between 50 and 60...
$2M+$3M+$1.5M=$6.5M
2. Don't pay off your mortgage @ 3%, you should be able to get better return than that
3. See if there are opportunities for you to do After tax 401k contributions, these can be rolled over into a roth, and you could, if allowed in your employer plan, invest a large amount of money into a Roth, which would not be open to you otherwise given your income.
4. Invest conservatively, as you have a very large pay check and could easily achieve your goal of retirement by 60.
5. Invest in low cost index mutual funds, Vanguard's Wellington is not the cheapest 0.18%, but it gives you both bonds and stocks in one fund, which you could just keep investing in and not worry about asset allocation too much. You'd also want some international exposure too. Bogleheads forum has lots of information on asset allocation.
A lot of rambling, but it seems like you have a good head for meeting your goals. Find a fee FA and bounce their suggestions off of this board and bogleheads and you should be able to attain your goals.
Good luck and keep us posted.
