In Part 2 we discussed some actionable items that can help you prepare for your retirement. In this post we’ll discuss how to determine how much money you’ll need or have in retirement.

Now that you are planning to retire and you understand there are no more “paychecks”, you need to determine how either how much money you’ll need in retirement. Of course we’ll also examine how much money you will actually have access to based upon your current savings, investments, pensions and Social Security.

How much will I need?

1. First of all the common recommendation is that you will need about 80% of your pre-retirement income in order to retire without a major life style change. Therefore if you (your household) were making $100,000/yr. you should be able to live on $80,000/yr. in retirement. However, this may not meet your needs, for example if you currently make $100,000/yr. but carry significant debt or have other financial responsibilities you may need a lot more than 80%.
2. The very best way to determine how much you’ll need is to develop a start from scratch, realistic expense budget. Be sure to include the cost of future healthcare insurance costs of buying cars, replacing appliances, vacations, etc. Also set aside a healthy emergency fund.
3. You can now search on line for retirement planning calculators to help you determine how much money you’ll need to actually retire. I found that T. Rowe Price recommended 11x your retirement income, Fidelity 12x, and so forth. All of these have varying assumptions. Here is another examples:

BTN Research estimates that, assuming 5% average annual investment returns, for every $1,000 of monthly income you want over a 30-year retirement, you need $269,000 in the bank. Let’s consider that same household making $75,000 a year. To replace the commonly recommended 80% of income in retirement — or $60,000 in this case — the household would need $5,000 a month. In this calculation, this household’s number is $1.35 million, or 18 times final pay. A higher investment return would bring the numbers down.

 Dallas Salisbury, president of the Employee Benefit Research Institute offers: You need 33 times what you expect to spend in your first year of retirement—after subtracting Social Security benefits. Let’s take that same household, which spends every penny of its $60,000 income in retirement. Say this household collects $20,000 a year in Social Security. That leaves it spending $40,000 from other sources. So this household still needs a nest egg of $1.32 million, or just shy of 18 times final pay

 In summary, you need to use on-line tools to start building retirement plans that cover both your expenses and available income.

In our next post we’ll discuss how some investments will help you grow your portfolio to meet your retirement needs.