Saw this in today's Washington Post about new recommendations from Fidelity. Basically it's advocating that you have some percentage of your salary saved up by a certain point to be ok in retirement. Getting past the assumption that a person shouldn't be FI/RE until age 67, there's some things that really leave me scratching my head (and yelling at my computer monitor)
1) apparently you don't need to have anything saved until age 30.... so little to nothing saved in your mid 20s? guess they're counting on being in debt then
2) 3x your salary by age 40? After being an adult for 22 years? To understand how low a bar this is for people to aim for suppose you had a college educated worker who made ~$55k/year (close to the median). If that person simply contributed to his/her IRA every year and earned a rather paltry 4.5% return they would hit this target. He/she would be saving 10% of their salary.
3) 7x by age 55? That's the 'danger zone' where you can be forced into early retirement, but still have an even chance of living another 3 decades. Assuming 4.5% returns (as above) now were are talking about a savings rate of just 8%.
4) the ever-present assumption that savings should be a multiple of your salary, and by extension that your future spending should be tied to your present-day earnings.
Interestingly, I was initially very skeptical about the recommendation that a 67 would only need 10x their salary. I ran a few numbers and came up with this: Understanding that SS will kick in, a 67yr retiree will need their savings to last another 23 years to make to age 90. THe shorter duration means that we can use a higher WR - I chose 5.5% because it's success for 23 years is similar to 4% for 40 year time frames. That gives $30k/year to the retiree, plus an estimated $23k/year from SS for working for 35+ years. This retiree would fit the assumption that spending will roughly equal their salary.
Edit: Here's the link to the WaPo article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2016/01/12/how-big-your-retirement-fund-should-be-at-every-age-according-to-one-guide/?hpid=hp_no-name_hp-in-the-news%3Apage%2Fin-the-news