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We got a great question here from Dylan.

He said, I've heard Dave's advice to contribute 15% to retirement accounts in Baby Step 4. In seasons, I've been tempted to back

it down and others to ramp it up and save more like 20%. Can you explain why you landed on 15%

and does it ever make sense to back it down or raise it up? It's a good question. And there is no

magic to this from my understanding. This is sort of a standard financial planning principle and the there is no magic to this from my understanding this is sort of a standard financial

planning principle and the idea is that if you do it too much you're not going to have enough money

to throw at baby step five for college baby step six for the house and if you don't do enough

you're not going to retire with a big enough nest egg yeah and there's no magic no magic to 15. I mean, you can call it 16,

you call it 17, you call it 14, you can call it 20. I mean, you can call it that. But I ran the numbers

in the early days of Financial Peace University on someone barely making it at the poverty level. In those days, I used $20,000 a year, income.

And I ran the numbers up to about $250,000 in income. And I just kind of did break points.

Every $40, $50,000 along, I did some break points. I said, okay, if this happened,

and if you, and I just said if you never got a

race, which is unrealistic, okay, would you have enough? Because, and then you look at, at those,

what is the disposable income left over after you put that percentage into retirement? Because

disposable income is the income left over to enjoy to be generous and to pay

down the house because I wanted to try to get the house paid off in seven to ten years and and that's

what's ended up happening by the way if you put more in the house doesn't end up getting paid off

on average and if you put less in, the house doesn't end up getting paid off on average.

And if you put less in, you don't end up with what you should have ended up with because you miss out on the compound interest and the market growth.

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