Hacker News Reader

Children, medical problems, divorce, expensive hobbies, stock crashes. Stuff happens. If you expect to live to 85, which is pretty reasonable, and keep paying to live in the Bay Area, do a little traveling, you'd want to pull down $100k or so per year and thus need about $2M in the bank.

View on HN

85 might even be low-balling it. I heard recently that Girl's born in Australia this decade now have an estimated 50% chance of hitting 100.

True if your $2M sits in an account earning zero interest. In reality you need quite a bit less than $2M if you want to guarantee 20 years at $100k.

At a 7% return you'd still need about $1.5 mil. And that's assuming that your hopefully more conservative investments in retirement earn 7% a year and over that 20 year span there is not a crash... This includes about 3.5% per year for inflation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com