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Consider that you will spend approximately the same after retirement as you do today (mortgage will go down, but you will have more free time to travel, do things, and spend more money on medical services).
If you spend say $100,000/yr today, you will need that amount of today's dollars per year when you retire.
Next factor in inflation, there's about 3% inflation per year, so in order to have the same spending power next year as this year, you would need $103,000.
Meaning if you are 36 and want to retire at 55, and plan to live to 105 (i always assume you should plan for living longer, because what happens if you plan too short, and you run out of money, and you DO live that long)... Anyway, you would need $5,000,000 of "today's dollars". A high-yield savings account at ~5.2% is going to barely beat inflation after you factor in income tax on the interest, so basically if you had $5,000,000 in the bank today, you would have $9M in the bank at age 55. $9M in the bank at age 55 would yield you enough to spend $100,000/yr until an age of 105. Basically he should be putting away ~200k/yr now and ramping up with inflation up to $450k/yr until retirement if he wants to reach a goal of having $100k/yr through retirement.
If you earn better yields through say stocks or mutual funds or bonds, you will do a bit better, but there's also some risk that you will do much worse.
In short, yeah, $300k for a 36 year old is too little in my opinion.
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