Say I make $100k gross per year. That's a very nice salary for a new grad engineer -- the kind of person who might take this ten-year-retirement advice to heart. Roughly 1/3 of that income goes to taxes, so I'm actually taking home $66k per year. If I save 66% of that, I'm saving ~$44k per year. These numbers can shift a little depending on where you live, how you save, etc., but they're not going to change by a huge amount.

Multiply that $44k by 10 years, and you're not even at half a million dollars. That's not retirement money (unless perhaps your "retirement" is to continue to live off of $20k/year indefinitely and die young from eating too much ramen).

The other half of the equation is finding investments that return a reasonable yield without betting the farm on timeframes <= 10 years. In this market, that's nearly impossible. Your choices are stocks and bonds (which are fine, but are risky on anything less than a ten-year window), or investments that don't yield anything.

With 1 million, you could live off of $25000/yr, which is more than enough to live like a king if you do not have other debt payments.

You could rent a $1000/month apartment, pay for a $400/month car, eat $300/month in groceries, and still have thousands and thousands left over.

Not if you're depending on using that money in the next ten years. Or if you believe in inflation.

A 4% rate of return from an index fund is long-term average behavior, not instantaneous yield. Historically, depending on when you entered the market, a ten-year outlook could have led to anything from a huge gain to a huge loss. If you're the unlucky investor who started saving 66% of your income in the stock market in 1999, you'd still be putting off your retirement today.

Also, your definition of "king" is pretty context-dependent. I can assure you that 25k will not allow you to live like royalty in San Francisco. Or, say, if you have children. It's a difficult concept to grasp when you're in your 20s, but most people do tend to reproducing by the time they're in their 30s. Oops. There goes that 25k retirement...

Average return for S&P 500 from 1928 to 2012 is 11.3% [ source : http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/... ]

Inflation rate averages about 3.2% [ source : http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term_... ]

11.26 - 3.2 = 8.1 % real return.

Long term investment in a diversified set of equities is a very good investment and is very likely to secure your future finances.

It's scary how many of you don't seem to know this. Did you all read the same book on investing and skip everything after the preface, or something?

Yeah. We aren't. This whole thread spawned because the claim was that you can retire in 10 years if you save 66% of your income.

I don't understand. Retiring after 10 years means you'll be retired for around 50 years, doesn't it?

It's why real-life retired people don't put their entire savings in the stock market. Retirement funds tend to have most of your money in fixed-rate securities by the time you actually quit working.

If you had enough money to live off for fifty years, the market taking a dump isn't going to wipe it out. Especially if you invested part of it before the market got high, and your total without accounting for dumps would have lasted seventy years.

This is interesting - I've shared this multiple times in other discussions like this, and a comment like yours is always the first response, that it seems low, questioning if I included dividends. If anything it might just underscore how our collective "societal" intuition might be a bit off in terms of long term retirement performance.

I think part of it is that people tend to contribute more to retirement when times are good, since they have the extra money, and contribute less when times are bad since they're just getting by. The problem is that the market tends to be high when times are good, and low when times are bad. So this will naturally depress performance for everyone. It's impossible to contribute a consistent amount every week/month without having a cash buffer (which would depress performance anyway).

Also, Firecalc is a good tool for running withdrawal strategies over historical data: http://www.firecalc.com/

It gave very positive results for withdrawing $25k/year on a $1M portfolio for a total of 60 years. Obviously, though, there is no 60 year period starting in 1999 for which the data is fully known, so it has its limits and can be prone to overfitting. It does take inflation into account, by the way (by increasing your withdrawal correspondingly each year).

"[Firecalc] gave very positive results for withdrawing $25k/year on a $1M portfolio for a total of 60 years."

Well, again, you're not likely to accumulate a $1M portfolio in a decade on a $100k salary without a nice helping of luck. And not for nothing: that 60-year period encompasses the largest bull market(s) in US stock history. Past performance definitely does not extrapolate in this case.

Marry someone with their own $25k/year and you'll be able to pay for plenty of college.

>Want to be ready for the day when you're old and paying for medical problems?

Insurance?

RETIRING in San Francisco would be a massive mistake. If you are retired why the hell are you living in a uber-expensive city. Location matters less when you don't have a job. Move up to Oregon.

Also if you decide to have children, that is a conscious decision you made to dump your millions down the toilet. I guess some people like kids enough to work an extra 30 years. I sure don't.

It's only "conservative" if you don't understand variance.

The risk isn't in the value of the average. The risk is in the variation around that average. Like I said: if you invested 66% of your net income in the stock market in 1999, you'd be a long way from retirement today.

And if you're tempted to keep arguing this point, you might want to take a moment to consider how I know this. (Hint: the reality of a great many investors trumps your theories of how the stock market works.)

Not all stocks offer dividends, and not all investors choose stocks with dividends (there are tax disadvantages to returning value via dividends rather than via appreciation of stock value.) Dividends offer a lower risk component of return, but typically in a diversified portfolio you can put some share of the portfolio in a lower-risk investment to have that lower-risk component.

So, for growth focused investors that aren't risk sensitive, dividends can be a negative feature, and for investors that are risk sensitive, they aren't essential as there are other ways to tune a portfolio around risk. This makes, at best, only a weakly positive net incentive, and more likely a negative net incentive, for firms to offer dividends.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icmRCixQrx8

More importantly when something bad happens you both have a cushion and a cheap lifestyle so it can last.

Actuarial tables show if you make it to age 40 you have a very high likelihood of making it to 80 or 90. Statistics show that the last decade of your life - thanks to health care needs or assisted living necessities - is often more expensive than any other decade of your life.

That's absolutely important to plan for in your 20's and 30's when you have the time (and energy) to make a difference.

You know that 50% or so of HN readers are not in the US, right? Some have to do with $300-$1000 a month (or less), with the same costs for food and costlier computers, clothes etc -- oh, and 3x the price of gas. And renting some small-ish appartment.