Cold Feet - Investing for Retirement

[IdealFugacity]

As the various topics of my posts have indicated, I'm in 3 months I will be starting my post-college job. After crunching some numbers last night, after taking out 8% pretax for 401k, and then 7.65% Social Security/Medicare from the post-401k value, I'm looking at around 4 grand a month BEFORE taking anything else out (income taxes, health benefits, disability, insurance, etc.)

Note that the overall salary will increase approx 4 grand every 6 months 4 times, leaving around a 5 grand / month value in place of the 4k/month listed above, again before deducting anything else.

I'm 22. I'll be in an apartment, who the heck knows how good it will be (free for first 6 months, on my own in a different state for at least 2 years after that unless one of the 6 month rotations brings me back to original location). I'll have car payments, insurance, etc..you all know how life is [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

How do I determine how what % of my savings should be going into other retirement accounts (Roth) and how much I should be putting into accounts more geared towards purchasing a home, etc? To get the full employer match, I'll already be socking away 8% of my salary a year automatically (+4% match). I could make a couple hundred extra a month if I did not contribute to 401k for the first 6 months (pre-match) but this reeks of a bad idea to me.

Most of the investment advice I can find on Vanguard, here, etc, is geared towards retirement. Which is all well and good, but at the rate of things I've been investigating, I'm going to end up with 6 months emergency funding in a money market fund, and then it seems like everything i DONT spend will be going into a Roth IRA! Unless I am overestimating how much of a chunk is going to be taken out of the 4k/month, obviously thats more money than i ever had inflow in my life but don't living expenses, car, rent, taxes etc take away a hugggge amount of that?