We often see commentary about how much a person needs to retire, and often that commentary suggests the need for some percentage of pre-retirement income, such as 70% or 80%. It’s not easy to predict what someone will need in retirement, but pegging it to some fixed percentage of income earned during working years is clearly wrong. This is either sloppy journalism or an effort to encourage people to deal with a brokerage firm. It’s probably fair to say that any generalization as to the amount needed that is supposed to cover all situations is guaranteed to be incorrect. Perhaps the idea is to get people to think about retirement needs. OK, we’re thinking about it. Now what? In some following posts, we’ll go into how individuals can make this calculation for themselves. Meanwhile, a piece of simple advice comes from Ben Stein, who writes excellent articles about retirement and related subjects in the New York Times: it’s better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.