RunningBum
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2007
- Messages
- 13,249
Geez, I wasn't even close to that when I retired at 49. I probably only maxed out in the last 15 years, but I know it wouldn't have made much difference had I done it the whole time. I did the rough math but will spare the details, and I generally don't share numbers here anyway. I don't know what the max contribution was in 1984, but $8900 would've been over 1/3 of my salary. I just deferred enough for the company match. Even with another 7 years of letting it grow post-retirement, I'm still not at half of $1.5M.This certainly could be true for today's twenty-somethings, but it's not at all the case for someone like me who started contributing to my 401k in the early '90s. The max employee contribution when I first started was only $8,900/year. And, as I mentioned, I contributed the max almost every year, consistently, for nearly 25 years. I also got a pretty good employer match for a large chunk of those years, yet my current 401k / IRA balance isn't even half of your $1.5MM estimate.