financial advisor????

[SAHD]

I talked with a "financial advisor" today at the Motley Fool.  I told him that we wanted to retire in 6 years, at the age of 54, we have a net worth of $2.4m, he told me I did not have enough to retire on and we should wait a few more years, until my wifes pension kicks in and we are closer to SS benifits.  I laughed.

[Workinghard]

Sounds like some of Suze Orman's advice. He may be right. Whether you have enough depends on lifestyle choices. One person I know with close to 5m is waiting a few more years based on ~200K living expenses--YEARLY.

Hard to comprehend.....

[Zamboni]

Some advisors have something against early retirement.  Just ignore him and do your own math.

[Thegoblinchief]

Do you have 25x living expenses, plus reasonable adjustments for costs over time?

At your assets, my withdrawal rate would be around 1%. Holy crap.

[Spork]

Did he actually do the math with your actual and projected living expenses?

[SAHD]

reply:
 He took our current salary of $250k, assumed we needed the 80+% rule of retirement income and concluded, we did not have enough money to live on.  Had I not been reading MMM and many other publications over the last 6 months or so, and had we not been already living a some what MMM live style,  I would have probably believed him.

I wonder if this is one of many reasons why many people do not save for retirement?  They read the ariticles stating they need 70-90% of thier salary to live off of and they need to have 20+ years saved up, and they conlude that the task is just so out of reach that they figure, why bother????

[Zamboni]

So basically he didn't do anything that a free online "retirement planner" program can't do.  In fact, he did less, because sometimes in those computer programs you can adjust the percent needed in retirement to below 70%.  Nice.  How does he think you saved $2.4MM if you really spend 80% of your $250K salary?