How much do you need for retirement?

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I was looking through past articles from the Philippines newspaper Inquirer (www.inquirer.net). I found this article from their Money Smarts blog. It's interesting and made me think a lot. Here's a section of the article (from http://inquirerbloggers.net/moneysmarts/2007/04/17/how-much-do-you-need-for-retirement/): "A simpler way is to look at your current gross income, then ask yourself how much income you would likely to have before retirement. Let's say you are earning PHP50,000 now and you have 20 years before retirement. Assuming that your salary will grow 5% per year until you are 65. You will earn PHP140,000 a month by the time you retire. That's around PHP1.7 million per year. A rule of thumb says you will likely need 70% to 80% of that per year to live comfortably when you retire. Multiply that by 25 and voila, that's the kind of nest egg you hopefully will not outlive." Based on that computation, I tried computing for my (& my husband)'s retirement fund... yaiks! big big big... and I was also thinking that by that time cost of living would be definitely higher... oh my...