It's scary how many of you don't seem to know this. Did you all read the same book on investing and skip everything after the preface, or something?

Yeah. We aren't. This whole thread spawned because the claim was that you can retire in 10 years if you save 66% of your income.

I don't understand. Retiring after 10 years means you'll be retired for around 50 years, doesn't it?

It's why real-life retired people don't put their entire savings in the stock market. Retirement funds tend to have most of your money in fixed-rate securities by the time you actually quit working.

If you had enough money to live off for fifty years, the market taking a dump isn't going to wipe it out. Especially if you invested part of it before the market got high, and your total without accounting for dumps would have lasted seventy years.

This is interesting - I've shared this multiple times in other discussions like this, and a comment like yours is always the first response, that it seems low, questioning if I included dividends. If anything it might just underscore how our collective "societal" intuition might be a bit off in terms of long term retirement performance.

I think part of it is that people tend to contribute more to retirement when times are good, since they have the extra money, and contribute less when times are bad since they're just getting by. The problem is that the market tends to be high when times are good, and low when times are bad. So this will naturally depress performance for everyone. It's impossible to contribute a consistent amount every week/month without having a cash buffer (which would depress performance anyway).