135 % of Salary needed in retirement ?

[Alan]

You make a very good point. I spend more money now than when I was working and I have a lot less income. Percentage of salary doesn't mean a hill of beans if you don't spend it all every month.

Exactly.

Just coming to the end of our 2nd year of ER and we will have spent ~140% of our pre-ER spending for the second year running. That is still only ~50% of pre-ER income, but we have drawn <3% from our investments each year.

Studies like these based on income are meaningless. It is expenses that matter, and if you can LBYM in retirement, the relation to pre-ER income is irrelevant.

 

[lhamo]

I agree that those X% of salary figures are mostly completely worthless to those of us who live well below our means already. We are currently living very well off of roughly one of our full-time, middle management level salaries and benefits. We are currently saving 40k+ a year in retirement accounts (DH is in the "catchup" phase and I have a good employer match, so that helps a lot), plus another 5-15k/year in college fund contributions for the kids. The remainder goes into other types of savings/investments that will eventually be used to pay off our mortgage. I was playing around with the Fidelity calculators last weekend, which are actually quite similar to FireCalc in how they work, and it looks like we could have DH retire at 58 (in 5 more years) and me at 55 and be fine -- 100% success rate, even if markets perform poorly. I think we would actually have a hard time spending 100% of our current salaries, much less 135%. I would feel WAAAY too guilty spending that kind of money. Unless we won the lottery or something. And even then, I would feel better having a nice nestegg and continuing to live frugally for the most part. A 1-2% SWR sounds great to me.