The 3 Retirement Numbers You Actually Need

Tyler Gardner (0:00)

The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, but the second best time is today. Once you know your number, you can make a plan. Once you have a plan, you stop spinning your wheels. You stop wondering if you're doing it right. You just do the math, save the money, invest intelligently.

Hello friends, this is Tyler Gardner welcoming you to another episode of Your Money Guide on the Side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance and investing. So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be. Welcome back my friends to the show that makes personal finance feel just a little less like a root canal, and more like a conversation you'd actually maybe want to have over coffee or while joining me for a walk in the woods of Vermont. Although it's a little cold these days, so I'm taking this day to be inside. I'm your host, Tyler, and today we're tackling the question that keeps people up at night more than I think most of us would like to admit. How much money do I actually need to retire? Or to have options? Or to just stop feeling like I'm one bad month away from having to sell a kidney to fund my 70s? Great question, as always. Because if there's one thing that truly does drive me nuts about most retirement advice, it's maddeningly vague. Save a million bucks. Aim for 10 times your salary, as if we only have one salary throughout our lives. You'll need 70% of your pre-retirement income. Cool, cool, and cool. But what does any of that actually mean for you, with your spending, your goals, your timeline? So today, we're going to calculate your actual number. Not just some generic target pulled from a financial planning textbook written in 1987, and still sitting on the coffee table of your financial advisor's office gathering a mild form of dust and shattered dreams. Your number, the one thing that gets you from, I hope this works out, to, at the very least, I know exactly what I'm building toward. And just a quick note before we dive in, and yes, this one's 100% self-serving, because it's also really exciting for me. And you know what? I'm proud of it. So I'm going to say it. A lot of today's content is adapted from my forthcoming book, With Norton, which will be published in early December, 2026 I'm incredibly pumped about this. And if you find this episode helpful, just know that about six months ago, I finally started listening to many of you and writing this all down. And I'm really pumped to share more about this journey as we get closer to pre-orders, but more on that later. Now, before we get into the actual calculations, and I promise we will, I need you to also do me one quick and very familiar favor. If you've been listening to this podcast and finding it helpful, would you please consider leaving a review on Apple or Spotify? It genuinely helps other people find the show, and it helps me know that this entire endeavor to make financial literacy accessible and quasi-digestible for all is actually moving the needle forward one day at a time. Okay, let's talk about your number. But we need to start by addressing the problem with save for retirement. Most people know, vaguely, that they should be saving for retirement. They've heard they need a million dollars, or enough to withdraw 4% annually, or 25 times their annual expenses. They nod along when someone mentions these figures at a dinner party, and then they promptly ignore all of it because it feels abstract, overwhelming, and impossibly far away even if we're already there. So they keep working, keep saving some arbitrary percentage of their paycheck, 10%, 15%, whatever their 401k auto-enrolled them at. And they just kinda hope it all works out. And maybe it will. But hoping for the best isn't exactly a plan. It's a coin flip with your future. The real issue is this. The concept of enough is completely useless without a number attached to it. It's like saying you want to drive to Portland without bothering to check if you meant Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine. The destination matters, and so does knowing how much gas you'll need to get there. And here's where it gets even trickier. There isn't just one magic number that solves everything. There are actually three numbers that I think you need to know, and which one you focus on depends entirely on what you want your life to look like. Think of it like Goldilocks. One number I'm about to show you, I think, is too hot. Way too aggressive for most people. One is too cold. Bare minimum survival mode. And one, to me, is just right. Enough security to give you options without requiring you to eat ramen for 20 years, unless that's your thing. So let's break down all three, and then you can decide which one makes the most sense for you. But first, and this is specifically for my 1 listeners, why your money needs to make money. At the risk of stating the obvious, bear with me, before we calculate any of these numbers, we need to understand the single most important concept in all of personal finance. It's not budgeting, it's not cutting lattes, it's not even saving itself. It's that your money needs to work for you. Because no matter how much you'd like it to be otherwise, you cannot save your way to retirement through discipline alone. The math simply doesn't math. Let me show you what I mean. Let's say you earn $95,000 a year, and you save 15% annually. That's $14.25 per year. If you do that for 40 years, and just stick it in a savings account, earning basically nothing, you'll have $570,000. But that's before inflation. In today's dollars, it would be more like $350,000.