DW and I have been evaluating life insurance options. One of the factors we have considered is the amount of money in retirement if one of us stops working, helping to bridge Social Security survivors to retirement age/etc. This required some extrapolation of our "future planning" spreadsheet -- for retirement contributions/growth/net worth -- way past where it previously was. It had stopped at age 50 (because seriously who wants to even consider working past 50???).
Anyways, I put some additional rows on there pushing it out to age 60 to check our retirement assets for traditional retirement ages and WOW is it weird to see those numbers. If we were to stop contributing after this year we will have a million in 2015-dollars in retirement accounts when we're age 60, assuming 5% average after-inflation returns**. That's with what we have in there now... in our 20s... ignoring any more contributions over our working careers.
... so for fun, I added contributions back in and realized how easy** it is to become multimillionaires if you save even just the 401k max a year with a nominal match (no IRAs), never really get raises, have much lower than $100k total income, and work until your 50s or early 60s (not that anyone here plans on this ha).
Anyone else do something like this, for fun? I found it really encouraging to realize how dramatically different of a lifestyle my wife and I are living than most folks.
**Obviously there is a lot of uncertainty in predicting 5% after-inflation average growth for that many years, blah blah, it's fun to put 7% which was the S&P real return :)