@mathjak - I get what you are stating but I still don't see the point of working too long to have a massive buffer. To me that is more of a risk than working to the point where I feel reasonably safe.
i can't tell you what is enough for you , only you can do that . but everything has a balance point . it is up to you to find it .
the problem is as humans our logic only deals with what we know . it does not take in to consideration all the things we don't know yet or that will eventually be important .
my list of priority's have changed so much as i age and i am only 63 . .
in fact we owned a 2nd home in the pocono's of pa. where we had planned to retire to eventually . why not , it was cheaper , we loved hunting and fishing and small town life .
well once we reached the point where we could retire i switched to my retirement hat and boy were our heads turned around .
now we are realizing everything we would want as we aged we lacked .
limited medical facility's with few choices
limited specialists with few choices
limited doctors with few choices
no public transportation system if we could not drive . you can't get milk without a 15 minute drive .
if i wanted to work a bit there were only low paying near minimum wage jobs
after 5 years there we were running out of things to do daily .
we were to far from family if we needed help or some care .
we were to far to be a weekly or daily part of our grand kids lives .
the list went on and on and we ended up selling and retiring right here in queens in nyc where we lived . it has everything we want in retirement although at a higher price but to us , well worth it .
when we first thought about buying the place and retiring in pa , these thoughts were not even on the radar and were totally left out of the equation by our brains at the time. .
so we were glad we developed the leval of savings we did . the life we planned around in pa was not the life we ended up really wanting .
at the end of the day only you know how much is enough , but i will say odds are that number will change as you go through life and different things become more important .
in our case we always wanted to live better in retirement then we did while saving , investing and struggling raising a family . it was our reward for reaching that point so we wanted as much as we could muster while retiring , still young enough to do anything we wanted . so we found our balance , everyone else has to find theirs .