Wise sages of 2+2 -- How much should one have saved before retiring?

[mtgordon]

So if you want to spend around 45k/year, you can break even with inflation (assume your 18k goes up per year with inflation as well), you're 40 and plan on living until you're 100, you need about 2.75M in todays dollars according to my calculations. I'm not sure why I'm off so much from everyone else though so I could be wrong.

Maybe they assumed you can beat inflation with your money. If you can beat inflation by 5% then you only need around 850k todays money according to my calcs.