I'm kind of embarrassed about this, but I had this poll on my sidebar for almost a year now. I kind of forgot about it. It's now gotten 106 votes (not necessarily unique votes, I think it allows 1 vote per IP address). Here are the results:

What annualized return on your retirement portfolio do you expect in the next 10-20 years?

• <5%: 2% (2)
• 5-6%: 8% (9)
• 7-8%: 40% (42)
• 9-10%: 26% (28)
• 11-12%: 8% (9)
• 13-14%: 3% (3)
• 15-16%: 3% (3)
• >16%: 9% (10)

Total Votes : 106

It's good to see that most people are in the 7-8% range. It's good to think conservative, at least when estimating what return you will get in the future in order to estimate how much you will have when you retire. It is interesting that I asked what return people expected on their "retirement portfolio" and some people actually selected the "above 16%" box. I find it hard to take that seriously. You would have to be taking on far more risk in order to expect that kind of return, and taking on a lot of risk in a retirement portfolio is not something you want to do.

Anyways, I'll be removing the poll feature now. It's part of an effort to clean up my site a bit by removing the clutter.