Congrats Class of 2021

[Johnson85]

This is probably the best advice you will ever get right here. I had an uncle who said that you should save 15% of your take home over and above any company retirement plan. He would ask me every time we met if I was saving 15%. It took about ten years in the workforce to understand why but in my early thirties I started saving and trying to catch up for past years. I retired at 55.

That's pretty good advice. I wish somebody had explained to me that 15% was barely adequate when I started off.

If you get 6% real returns (which I view as on the optimistic going forward), and save 15% year in, year out, you'll be financially independent in 38.6 years. Obviously that assumes you will the same amount of money in real terms your entire career which won't be the case, but that means to do any better, you actually have to start saving more than 15% as your salary grows if you want to maintain the same lifestyle in retirement as you do while working. And that assumes that you save every year, and don't have setbacks, which is not going to be the case for most people.

Of course you should have social security on top of that, but I'd never want to be in a position where I felt compelled by my financial position to argue that younger and on average poorer people should have to pay more taxes to support my lifestyle.