I always heard you should try to have at least your annual salary in tax sheltered investments by age 30 plus the emergency fund. So basically it's now down to even less than that?
Granted I failed to accomplish this personally but I was an idiot. If In could go back and slap 18 year old me that would have been entirely doable without even being THAT intense. C'est la vie.
This is REALLY hard / impossible for high income folks. 18k a year limit makes this pretty tough, but it is hard to complain :)
Yet another example of why planning retirement numbers based off of income is a terrible idea.
Well it's just something I have heard, like always put 20 percent down on a house.
It shouldn't be hard even with a high income, I could tax shelter something like 46k a year theoretically, and someone with an SEP IRA (and if your income is that high you generally have one of these) should have lots of space. I haven't been in the tax game for a long time but tricks from investing in low turnover index funds, tax loss harvesting, using SL depreciation, and investing in real estate can often help simulate tax advantaged space or at least they could back then.
But honestly "folk wisdom" rules of thumb will never make sense for people in the far end of the tail. That's why I had to take classes to learn what people in that portion of the income distribution have to do differently, haha. The marginal utility of money is one reason, ownership of high value assets complicates things, personal opportunity cost is another factor, the tax code is written for the bottom 95%, etc.
Is it not ironic I know exactly what to do with a high income despite having never earned one?