Retirement Savings: u r doin it rong

I started doing some research this week on retirement savings. I've been saving at least 6% of my gross salary since I started working about 12 years ago (minus one year in grad school). So I assumed I'd be fine.

What should I be saving?
When I started playing around with the calculators, it seems I am underfunded by about half. My Pudding Score is 52. The more I researched the more I came to believe, however, that there is no real way to tell how much one needs to save to retire. All of the calculators make you make rediculous guesses about expected investment returns and other factors that if you knew you'd be a millionaire from being able to read the future.

I did find a few more simple, logical guidelines. Dave Ramsey says save 15% for retirement. Apparently T.Rowe price says the same thing.

I feel kind of cheated to be learning this now. I had always heard that I should be contributing 6% of my salary to retirement. I think I would have contributed more if I'd had known I'd be "behind" at this point.

Non-Deductible IRA?
I had been planning to max out my 401K contribution this year which takes me to a little more than 10% of my gross saved. There's not really any other tax-advantaged way for me to save, as I don't qualify for a Roth IRA and if I were to contribute to an IRA, it is not tax-deductible. It seemed at first this was still a good deal, but I like how this CNN article describes the advantage. Basically it will only help me if I convert it next year to a Roth IRA. I think I will end up doing that. So even though my stragtegy was to have as much cash as possible for an apartment down payment, I think I'm going to throw an extra $5K into my IRA to take me to both the contribution limit and 15% of my salary saved. Even one of my fave bloggers thinks 15% is high, but since I am apparently sooo behind in my savings, I think I'll do it this year. I've hit my social security taxable income limit, so I should get about an extra $2K to contribute from that.

Potentially Good News on Roth IRAs

An article in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye tonight, as I still have my 401ks and IRA on my mind. The article claims that there will be new rules for Roth IRAs and that the income limit, which I currently exceed, will be lifted. Apparently the rules about income for converting (but not funding) will demolish the income limit. The catch? There are taxes involved. This is all new to me because once I saw the income limits I stopped investigating Roth IRAs. When (if) I convert my 401k to a Roth IRA, I will have to pay income tax on the contributions and the earnings.

So how would this influence my decision to transfer my old 401K? The article answers just that question:
“If you’re thinking about doing a Roth conversion, leave your 401(k) alone” rather than rolling it into an IRA beforehand to keep your share of nondeductible contributions higher in the calculation above, says John Carl, president of the Retirement Learning Center LLC in New York

Another factor to consider when I try to decide what to do with the old 401K. Does anyone else spend this much time strategizing around where to keep assets? I don't even have a lot of assets, relatively speaking.