On: Box's 65-Year-Old Android Engineer Gives Your Star...

[svachalek]

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.

[whatusername → svachalek]

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.

[alexkus → svachalek]

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.

[chadcf → alexkus]

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.