By Chuck Jaffe, MarketWatch

BOSTON (MarketWatch) Most financial rules of thumb have been around for decades, offering guidance like Subtract your age from 100 to determine the percentage of assets you should hold in stocks, or To retire comfortably, your investments must generate 75% of your final salary.

The advice is more imprecise than incorrect, but it frequently is used as gospel. As the late Lynn Hopewell, former editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, once told me: Rules of thumb are for people who want to decide things without thinking about them.

While the market may be welcoming a new round of easing, there was no joy among savers. Chuck Jaffe reports. (Photo: Getty Images)

This week, however, Fidelity Investments unveiled what amounts to a new financial rule of thumb, in the form of retirement-savings guidelines based on its research, effectively laying out a road map that allows workers to check their progress at key points along the way.

The take-away on the research is likely to be considered the next financial axiom: Employees need eight times their ending salary to meet basic retirement income needs. That is the target that people will now be setting and the number they will be aiming for, rather than making decisions about a personalized, appropriate savings level.

Before Fidelitys research moves from suggestion to perceived financial guideline and, potentially to rule of dumb, its important to understand what the company was attempting and how it intends its numbers to be used.

For starters, Fidelity didnt just give the final target number, but rather set up checkpoints markers on the road of life where someone might want to measure their progress toward the ultimate goal. While acknowledging that every individual situation differs based on someones desired retirement lifestyle, Fidelitys target is replacing 85% of pre-retirement income.

Right off the bat, that means they have changed the older rule of thumb that talked about needing your investments to generate three-quarters of your pre-retirement income.

Having sufficient funds to generate 85% of your final salary by age 67 will require hitting the benchmark number of eight times final salary, Fidelity said.

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Chuck Jaffe: New rules for a rewarding retirement