ziggy29
Moderator Emeritus
It's hard to say. A lot of depends on the economy and market cycles, and that depends on, well, the "birth lottery" and being born at the right time.Is this the first time net worth is profiled with age?
I am not sure people in 40 today can grow their wealth to that level of 60 after 20 years.
The early baby boomers have better economic environment for them to grow wealth.
If you're born in (say) 1940, you hit your peak earning and saving years during a long, explosive bull market -- and by 2000 at age 60, if you lived below your means and invested appropriately, you probably saw a massive spike in net worth from 40 to 60. If you started to become significantly more conservative by the time you were 60, you took a fair bit of those gains "off the table" before the Ursa Major descended on us.
People born in 1960, on the other hand, started a horrible run for investing when they hit 40. Yes, it's still possible they can enjoy a bull run at some point in the future, but demographics and economic drags don't make that feel very likely. Their only saving grace might be that they still have to invest aggressively at an older age because their current retirement nest egg just hasn't grown as much as it needs to.
It's made even worse by reading the tea leaves and realizing that the 1960 person isn't as likely to get as good a retirement deal from employers or the government as the 1940 person anyway.
I guess I was lucky (or prescient) despite the relatively bad timing of my birth. I was aggressively saving into my 401K since the late 1980s, putting 10% or more of my income into the market while it still had a decade to shoot up. I didn't trust business *or* the government to honor the deals they had made with me regarding the pension or Social Security (as we know it today). That is the *only* reason I have a good chance to retire well before 60 today. If I didn't do that -- if I assumed SS and Medicare as we knew it would be strong and solvent for me, not watered down, if I assumed my first Megacorp employer would never freeze my pension before I really had a chance to grow it much, if I used this as a rationalization that I'd have a comfortable retirement at 55 without needing to grow my own personal retirement savings -- I might not ever be able to retire.
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