How much should you save for retirement? Marlena Lee, PhD, from Dimensional Fund Advisors, discusses important factors that can help you meet your goals, like determining your savings rate, monitoring your progress, and making adjustments over time.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to know what you’re on track to have at retirement so that you can consider what changes, if any, need to be made today to get you where you want to be. We get to control how much risk we take with our investments, when and how much we save for retirement, our retirement date and how much we pay ourselves in retirement from our savings. None of us can control the stock market, bond market or the future of the IRS tax code. It’s not to say that those variables are not important, but we should not spend the bulk of our time planning for retirement consumed by those factors that we cannot control