NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - I wonder if I'm saving enough for retirement based on my age and salary. Is there a standard against which I can measure myself or a way to gauge where I should be financially?

-- Tushar, Phoenix, Arizona

There are a couple of ways to consider this issue. First, let's recognize that there's a natural human instinct to want to compare ourselves against other people to see how we shape up. Am I ahead of other people in my age or income group when it comes to how much I sock away each year? Have I accumulated more overall net worth, or wealth, than other people my age or with comparable incomes?

It's difficult to get definitive answers to such questions, but you can get a pretty decent idea of how you stack up by checking out a couple of government surveys.

The first is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditures Survey, which the government refers to as the CEX (why not CES, I have no idea). Basically, the Bureau asks roughly 110,000 American households for information about their income and their spending. Expenses are then broken down into a variety of categories including food, housing, transportation, entertainment, etc.

The CEX then lists average expenses for all the households, plus it breaks it down by the age of the head of household and by the income of the household. So by starting with income and then subtracting out the expenses for households similar in income and age to yours, you can get a decent idea of how you stack up against your peers.

To get an idea of how your net worth -- the value of what you own minus what you owe -- compares with that of comparable households, you can check out the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF).

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This survey, based on information from some 4,500 households, provides scads of info about American households' ownership of various assets (houses, cars, investments, etc.) as well as their liabilities (mortgages, car loans, personal debt, etc.). Again, you can compare your net worth versus that of other households broken down by both income and age.

Now, while all this may be interesting -- and, who knows, maybe even helpful if it spurs you to save more -- you should be aware of the limitations of this approach.

For one thing, as with any survey, you've got to allow for a lot of squishiness in the data in both the CEX and SCF. I'm sure both the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Fed do all they can to make these surveys as rigorous as possible. But the data is really meant more as a way to look at the big picture of how Americans are spending their money and faring financially overall than to give individual households a means of comparing themselves. And there is a considerable lag time with the data. In both cases, the latest surveys have 2001 data.

I'd also caution that the more important indicator of whether you're on track toward a comfortable retirement is whether you're saving enough and investing wisely given how much income you'll need to draw from your investment assets once you retire.

You may be well ahead of the average American household of your age and income. But what good is that if, based on your annual savings and the growth in your retirement portfolio, you're going to have to downsize your standard of living in retirement? When it comes to tracking progress for retirement, the real standard is your expectations. Are you doing well enough that you have a reasonable chance of generating the income you'll need to live the way you want?

Answering that question is a lot harder than checking out a few government surveys.

Basically, you need to create a retirement plan that starts with an estimate of how much income you'll need in retirement, then estimates how much you'll get from sources like Social Security and corporate pensions and, finally, what kind of retirement savings you'll have to accumulate during your career to bridge the gap between your income needs and Social Security and pensions. (And, unless you're getting a retirement package the size of former NYSE chairman Dick Grasso's, you will be facing a gap.)

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You can begin creating your retirement savings plan by going to our very own Retirement Planner. Once you've created a plan, you should check in periodically -- say, once or twice a year -- to update it for any significant changes in your financial circumstances and to see whether you're still on track or need to make some adjustments.

And that, ultimately, is the standard you should use: how well you're making progress toward the financial goals you yourself have set.

Walter Updegrave is a senior editor at MONEY Magazine and is the author of "Investing for the Financially Challenged." He also answers viewers' questions on CNNfn's Money & Markets at 4:40 PM on Monday afternoons.