Before you can start planning for retirement, you need to set a goal for how much you need to save.

Determining how much you need for retirement isn't an exact science, though. You might be familiar with rules of thumb: "you should be able to replace 80% of your pre-retirement income" or "you should have 10 times your final year's salary in investments." But those rules are problematic for several reasons, least of which is that it's impossible to know how much you'll be earning in your 60s if retirement is still decades away.

Relying on a one-sentence rule that makes sense for everyone's retirement will never work. That's why it's better to have a framework for determining how much you'll need in retirement.

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Source Fool.com