The 4% Rule: The Easy Answer to “How Much Do I Need for Retirement?”

1) This article set a basic and easy way to put a number on how much you would need to be able to retire. basically it said: Take your total yearly expenses, Multiply it by somewhere between 20 and 50 (he liked 25), and that's the amount needed. This pretty much says the amount you need to retire is the amount you spend per year, for X number of years after you plan on retiring. He suggests the best way to get this number to a small, manageable number is to reduce your spending per year.

3) This makes sense, and is doable, but I think is also sort of common sense at the same time. The purpose of retirement is to be able to have enough money to survive between the time you stop working, and the time you die. If you're able to spend less per year, you're going to need less money to get through that year. I like this viewpoint as it changes the view from the common "I need to get as much money as possible" to "I need to spend less than [#] in order to retire when I'm X years old." Definitely doable as far as consciously cutting back on expenses, and a good idea in practice. However, I personally think both viewpoints here are morally wrong. You shouldn't live your life trying to get as much money as possible, but at the same time you shouldn't try to squeeze yourself in order to retire.

On a personal and somewhat unrelated note, I'm very anti-money in the first place, so I think savings and things like retirement and investing and other things are morally wrong, and a waste of time and effort. people should be doing what they like to do, Period. And they should like doing things that can help people/society in some way. So I think it's sort of wrong that people "want" to retire, like working is somehow bad in some way, and retirement is some sort of reward people get once they've worked enough to be able to not work anymore. That mentality just seems so negative to me. you should get a job doing what you like to do, and not even think about retirement. Just do what you do, and want you want to do. I've put a considerable amount of thought into this problem specifically and although there may be things that could be done to make this better, It's generally not possible to create the ideal situation in regard to this in our country with our government, or with our economy. Unfortunately.