Know Your Retirement Number — Simple Math Anyone Can Do

About half of Americans have no idea how much money they actually need to retire—even high earners. You’re in your 30s, working hard, saving “something,” but here’s the twist: without a clear retirement number, your strategy’s basically a road trip with no destination.

Roughly 1 in 5 Americans has more than $500,000 saved for retirement—and yet, if you look at what typical retirees actually spend, many will need over a million dollars to maintain their lifestyle. That gap between “what people have” and “what they’ll likely need” is where stress, delay, and painful cutbacks come from. In your 30s, it’s easy to assume you’ll just “figure it out later,” but later has a habit of arriving faster than expected.

In this episode, we’ll take your retirement number from fuzzy to concrete using simple math you can run on a napkin at lunch. No spreadsheets, no fancy software—just a way to connect the life you want in your 60s to the dollars you’re putting away in your 30s. By the end, you’ll know whether you’re broadly on track, a bit behind, or need a serious course correction, and you’ll understand what levers you can pull now while time is still on your side.