Comments by "" (@Green__one) on "How Much Do You Need to Retire?" video.

I'm guessing that you are trying to pick winners and losers in the market. Losing lots of money is very consistent with that, my invested money over the same time period has gone up nearly 20% this year. I didn't try to pick winners or losers, I invest in the whole market through broad-based ETFs.
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Yep this is the absolutely the wrong way of calculating it. Always look at spending not income, the two are not at all related. Based on his version of calculating that promotion you talked about is a punishment not a gift. The worst part is, spending is not that hard to find. There are a few very easy ways, the easiest is usually to just look at the contribution slips for your savings/investment accounts. You'll be given those once a year at tax time anyway, subtract that from your net income (also calculated at tax time every year), and you know how much you spent. Ideally average it over a few years to deal with one-offs. Based on my numbers 80% of my pre-retirement income, would allow me to spend double what I do pre-retirement, sure I might like to travel, but I still don't think I need to double my pre-retirement spending.
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Lost me as soon as you advocated for a retirement income based on pre-retirement income. How much you make is not at all correlated to how much you spend. If I'm currently spending 50% of what I make and saving the rest, there's no reason I would need to up that to 80% after I retire. Any model based on pre-retirement income rather than pre retirement spending is severely flawed and there's no point in even looking at it.
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While defined benefit plans are considered the gold standard, I highly recommend looking into the details of your particular plan. I had a defined benefit plan at my last employer, but it turns out that it had no provision in it at all for inflation, making it a very poor plan indeed. After running numbers based on historical returns and inflation rates, I discovered there was a greater than 80% chance that I would do better investing the money myself in a broad market-based ETF, then to take the pension. And that's even after counting the massive tax hit in cashing it out because the Canadian government still bases those tax tables on the 1970s. Now only time will tell if I made the right choice, but with a greater than 80% chance of doing better this way I thought it was definitely worth the risk.
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@juliantheapostate8295 The plan I had gave you a choice of death benefits, the more death benefit, the less monthly pension. I factored all of that in, as well as a long retirement (I used age 95), and then compared against historical figures for inflation and returns for my preferred portfolio of stocks, bonds, and cash for every period since 1871. Based on those numbers, more than 80% of the time I would have been better off cashing out and investing myself. Now I could find myself in the other 20% here going forward, but the odds were good enough that I was willing to take the risk of investing it myself.
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I've now settled on 1.2 million as my target, however that's only because I have expensive taste in cars, if I exclude that, I'm very well set up on under 900k. So 1 million is a totally reasonable target, as long as your spending is reasonable.
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