Welcome back to the podcast. We reach a huge milestone today, huge for us anyways,

our 300 million episode play of all time. 300 million times an APJ episode has been listened to. I am simply in awe of what

God has done in and through this podcast for the last 12 years. Thank you all for listening, for

engaging, for sending in your questions over the years, for sharing our episodes with your

family and your friends, and of course for praying and supporting our work. We couldn't do this work without a lot of friends helping us.

And if you want the backstory on how this podcast started and grew over time, I tell that

in the Aspaster John book in the introduction and there I list our key benchmarks and one little footnote are key stats and well you can grab a pin now and add this new benchmark to that footnote in the margin of footnote 51, write 300 million plays October 17th, 2024.

Amazing.

Speaking of huge numbers, how much money does an American need to retire?

That question was in the air of the spring after the Wall Street Journal featured a piece by

Andrew Biggs titled, You Don't Need to Be a Millionaire to Retire.

In part he wrote that quote, according to a new survey from Northwestern Mutual, the average American

thinks he'll need 1.5 million dollars in savings to be financially secure in old age.

If that were true, it would be bad news.

As USA Today recently reported, the average U.S. adult has saved only 88,400 for retirement.

Among those with between 50,000 to 100,000 in savings, a small fraction of what retirees are told they need.

3% found it hard to get by, 11% were just getting by, and 86% were either doing okay or living comfortably."

A huge disparity here in the numbers, obviously on this podcast, we don't get into

specific numbers, Pastor John, but you have fielded a lot of questions about retirement,

as can be seen in the APJ book on pages 429 to 439.

In building out this theme comes this question from Linda, a podcast listener who is in her late 50.

She wants to know if you have any guiding thoughts on this question.

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