<prompt> Human: EDIT: Thanks so much everyone for the lucid replies. You have all been tremendously helpful in not only this thread but in many others I have lurked. This is one of the best subreddits and you guys should offer to teach a course on personal finance in that subreddit where redditors teach little-courses for free to other redditors.---Im 24, I started a good career in the tech industry see user name and my girlfriend is in med school. I was lucky enough to graduate without debt. I thought I would fall comfortably in the upper-middle class.But then I found out someone my age will need about 3-4 million to retire, counting estimated inflation.My girlfriend will be 300k in debt by the time she is done Tuition has gone up for med school too.She wants 3 kids. Im guessing it will cost 200k - 300k total to send them to college by the time they are old enough. Plus I read somewhere that a kid takes about a million bucks including college to raise.A house will cost on the order of 1 million I live in CaliforniaHow am I going to afford all of this? I took the advice of this subreddit and I am getting used to living below my means, maxing out my Roth 401k and IRA saving at least 22k after tax a year -- but this is only a drop in the bucket.Can someone with more life experience tell me everything is going to be OK? Or can someone just candidly tell me the bald truth?Thanks.  <response>: Dont forget you have a lot of time to get where you need to. Keep up the 22K per year for 40 years and get 4 per year and youll have about 1,500,000 inflation adjusted dollars. Also, I need X dollars to retire is one of the misnomers. Youll really need to start looking at lifestyle when you retire as opposed to a big huge pile of dollars. 