Imagine someone gives you a $100 bill and tells you to buy dinner – but without saying where or what you should order. For some people, it would be enough for the entire meal, including the drinks and the tip, but for others it would be gone before the entrée arrives at the table. How much money you need for the future and how far it will go all depends on the lifestyle you want to lead.

Here are four tips to help you make these decisions:

Be realistic about your retirement lifestyle
Multiple vacations to exotic locales every year might have been sustainable while you were working, but you might have to scale down your lifestyle unless your savings goals include those vacations. Be realistic. Your retirement savings must last for the rest of your life. A lifestyle that consumes 25 percent of your savings in the first year is not a secure retirement plan, unless you have a contingency plan for outliving your savings.

Estimate your life expectancy
Knowing how long you are expected to live is a good place to begin when planning your retirement savings. After all, the goal of saving for retirement is to set aside enough money and invest it wisely so it will support you for the rest of your life. Life expectancy calculators are great tools for helping you to visualize how long your retirement savings and income must last. For a free, easy-to-use life expectancy calculator, go to www.profile-financial.com and look under the education tab. For planning purposes, presume a longer lifespan than the calculators predict just to be on the safe side.

Look at your current expenses

When planning your retirement budget, start by looking at the checks you write each month. Too many people enter retirement under-capitalized to the point of being unable to meet their monthly obligations. If you have a mortgage, car loans, and your children's student loans or weddings to pay, these obligations are not going to disappear magically just because you have decided to retire.