...passed along by Patrick Ewing. "Sure NBA players make a lot of money, but we spend a lot too."

The reason they use multipliers of your salary and not set amounts is due to a belief that people who earn more money get accustomed to the lifestyle of having more and spending more.

So - using your example - if you've been earning $200,000 a year, and that's what you've been spending, you don't want to suddenly have been saving the same amount of the guy who was making $50,000 a year - and now you're living with his budget instead of your own.

My own personal experience - I have a payroll deduction set at a certain % of my salary that goes right into my retirement account. Because it's a %, you would assume that as my salary goes up, so will the amount I'm saving, and in the end I'll have what I need to retire, right?

I received a big promotion and raise - and when I logged in to check my retirement account a few months later and decided to play around with the retirement calculator they have, I found that with my prior salary and savings amount, the calculator had me in the "green" of saving enough. But with the new pay increase - even though I was now saving more - I had been moved into "orange" of being at risk of not having enough. Because the calculator was assuming that with my higher pay, I would also be spending more in retirement.

Hopefully that makes sense - these recommendations/calculations are all based on the idea that in retirement you'll want to have 80% (or thereabouts) of your pre-retirement income to live on in retirement. If you're OK cutting way back on spending in retirement, then you won't need as much as they suggest.