It is never too early to plan for retirement. The earlier you start to save, the more years you have to compound earnings and grow that money. Even if you’re right out of college (or even younger), start saving! The amount of money you should have saved for retirement is dependent on factors such as the age you retire, how long you live and how much money you need to live off of. You should assume that you will want to maintain the same level of lifestyle as you did before you retire. Don’t assume it will be easy to start living more lean. One general rule of thumb is to assume in retirement you will need between 70-80% of your income.
For example, if your current salary is $100K, and you put away $15K into a 401K, then your pre-tax income is $85K. You would need to have between $60K to $68K income per year in retirement. If you retire at 65 and live 30 more years, that equates to over $2M is savings needed when retiring.
US News has a good basic calculator that can give you a general ballpark idea of the savings you should have accumulated before retiring:
http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/features/calculator
Be sure to read through all of the explanatory text to understand each input into the calculator. One helpful link mentioned on this site is for calculating your expected social security benefits:
http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/quickcalc/index.html
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