Personal Finance

First, thanks for contributing. I credit r/personalfinance as one of the most important factors that allowed me to become financially literate. Still cleaning up the messes of my 20's, but things would be WAY worse if I wouldn't have been able to self-educate. I'm not going back to Reddit, so I'm thankful that you're contributing content here instead.

In regards to your question, relatively poorly.

I'm 31. My salary when I began work after grad school was 35k with only 2% going into retirement; now my salary is north of 100k with 15% going into retirement. I am at about 40% of my annual income, so definitely behind. I should be able to have some nice catch-up progress over the next five years, but I can't help but feel like a better starting job pre-COVID would have set me up way better.

At 29, we're at $170k in retirement funds with $150k household income. I've been lucky to max my 401k and Roth IRAs for both my wife and I the past two years. The biggest thing I've done to accomplish that is increasing my contribution with each pay raise I've gotten. Our net income hasn't increased much over the past 5 years, but our gross income has increased ~$60k.

Every few months, I'll run the numbers on what is needed to retire and I think we're in pretty good shape. I intentionally don't include my wife's pension or Social Security in those calculations, which makes me feel a bit better about where we are.

You tripled your salary in 5 years so the rules of thumb will fall apart a little bit.

I started my career pretty late, so I'm in major catch-up mode, trying to hit 2x at 35. Starting last year I've maxed both my 401k and IRA every year. Plan is to keep on doing that so that every raise going forward I get to keep. Also on that note my raises typically hit mid-year, which makes figuring stuff out worse

While catching up on retirement I've also been establishing an E-fund (~18 months currently) and a car replacement fund (~50% of what it needs to be with current prices), so my budget has been pretty brutal the past few years. I'm hoping to ease up a little once I hit 35, though then house savings start so who knows.

I've only been working for 10 years but I have 2x at 40. I also live a low consumption lifestyle, so I'm not worried at all, and my salary has gone up 50% in the past 4 years. I now make 120K and have about 250K in assets. I do run CC debt now, usually about 3-4K but only on 0% interest rates for large purchases like furniture and appliances, which i have had to make a lot of recently.

Sadly I most of my peers have nothing saved for retirement or like 1x at most... and live high consumption lifestyles. People who make half what I make spending like 2-3x as much. I save 25% of my take home. Most are depending on parental wealth inheritance to buy homes and pay for retirement.