No One Gets Rich by Shunning New Cars and Lattes | Hacker News Reader

No One Gets Rich by Shunning New Cars and Lattes

bloomberg.com

50 pointsknown93 comments

You get rich either by being in the absolute top echelon of your field assuming also that you are in a lucrative field, by ownership of the means of production, or by inheriting or marrying into it.

Those are pretty much the choices.

Really depends on what “rich” means. And whether you consider investing in public markets or real estate to be “owning the means of production”. Because many, many millionaires get rich by those methods, for some reasonable value of rich.

Truth. Living within your means and maxing out retirement accounts will get you to millionaire status in 20-30 years, faster if you’re more aggressive about it (buy a fixer upper to realize sweat equity, BRRR real estate investment method, build your own business). I’ve followed these principles and am financially independent in my late 30s.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1002103360646823936.html

TLDR Own and build things that generate income and store wealth (real estate, equities, fixed income, shares in a business, etc). Optimize for wealth, not status.

This won’t get you to be a billionaire. That requires mostly luck, inheritance, knowing the “right” people, etc.

By absolute top echelon I think he's talking about billionaires, not millionaires. You can't bootstrap a used car dealership or dry cleaner into mega-yacht wealth territory, but you can still retire with a nice sailboat.

I thought that was referring to skill, not starting wealth - the latter would be covered anyway by “owning the means of production”

You can get pretty comfortable (rich for most people's definition) just being average and capturing a small part of a market. I guess one could stretch the definition of "ownership of means of production" but I'm not sure that's what you meant by it. Specially in the internet age the bar is much lower to be able to participate in the market like this.

It really depends on how you define rich. I think the traditional concept of “having enough assets work for you that you do not have to” (i.e. the idle rich) is the correct bar, but we often mean mega-rich now (centimillionaires+) when we say rich.

I ran a small business you’ve never heard of, and left it four years ago with a not huge (<£1M) amount of money - but it was enough for me to acquire enough working assets that I have been able to retire from having to work in my early 30’s. I spend less than the assets earn, and because I’m free from having to work, I’m able to live in an inexpensive country, where my purchasing power is huge - freeing yourself from direct labour is the dividing line in my view - and you can get there by eschewing depreciating assets and instead acquiring earning assets. I don’t own a helicopter, I don’t have a yacht, my car is a beat up 1988 hilux - I could have those things, but then I would be poor again.

I did spend a lot on coffee, while running the business, admittedly.

"Capturing a small part of a market" is literally the definition of "ownership of means of production"!

I get that political history makes discussion of Marx's ideas a ridiculous hot potato. But the actual economics behind it is pretty banal and uncontroversial. If you own a business you can get rich without bound (or bounded only by the size of the relevant market), and if you don't you're trapped at whatever the market has set for wages in your profession.

That's, really, just sort of a "duh" point. This very website is effectively dedicated to that exact pursuit! "Make things people want so you can hack the system, find an exit and get rich" is just a restatement of "the bourgeoisie can lift themselves above the proletariat by ownership of the means of production" from the bourgeois perspective.

Whether that is good or bad, or deserves a revolution to adjust, is sort of a different issue. But no one seriously argues with the facts here.

Well, in tech "means of production" is mostly a brain.

"In a knowledge economy, computers and networks are means of production." [0] In our world, datacenters and fiber backbones are the primary infrastructure upon which we depend.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production

Actually no. If you work for, say, Facebook, and use your brain to do ML image recognition analysis, you get paid wages. They're good wages, but they're still wages and you don't get more unless the market decides that machine learning geeks need to be paid more. You don't own the means of production. Zuckerberg et. al. do. And nothing changes that, no matter how high your wages are and how big your brain is. If you work for facebook you get paid market wages and all the excess profit (and more importantly control over how new investments are spent) goes to someone else.

And the point of communism (informed by late 19th century industrialization) was that this imbalance leads to inevitable injustice as proletarian wages get pushed ever lower by increasing automation and centralization. It wasn't even wrong, really, though it doesn't have much relevance to tech jobs today.

But to confuse "a brain" with "the means of production" is fundamentally missing the point of the concept.

Choices 1 and 2 (and the "marrying in" option of the 3rd) have an implicit "you were born into a white, upper class family" built into them. To even have the opportunity to get to the top of your field or own means of production, you have to start from a base of financial surplus (not necessarily extreme wealth, though it helps).

If you're anything less than that, the best you can do is try to give your kids an upper class environment to grow up in. Or just opt out of the "money is happiness" game and find other things that fulfill you.

Not really.

I’d guess that most people whom you’d assume to be fancy white upper class folks are broke, and many of the poor brown people whom you pitty are more prosperous than you think.

In my life I can think of a relative whose family was living it up: fancy house and cars in a desirable suburb, kids went to great colleges, had great stuff, etc. It was all a show, fueled by home equity and debt. Now they are retired and living in subsidized housing on Social Security, and the BMWs were replaced by a 15 year old Civic.

The I look at a gentlemen who recently passed away at my church. He was a custodian and handyman, his wife is an LPN. He left a significant legacy to his kids and a school, and by all accounts led a fulfilling and happy life, with many people whom he had touched in some way.

The reason why stories of librarians and janitors leaving huge fortunes when they die makes news, is because it is so rare, not because these people are secretly hording tons of money or have found the secrets of wealth. Many low income ppl live paycheck to paycheck and or have little to save. Stories of rich and successful people blowing away their money are popular, but the media ignores all the stories of people who make a lot of money and invest and save diligently and and retire with a lot of money and do not go broke.

Or get lucky... lots of people stumble into business... they are not the top of their field - they happen to be right place right time, and have sufficient skill to recognize the opportunity and not screw it up

Edit: of course people want to complain. Read the Black Swan. It'll make you happier. The world isn't fair.

This post is so out of touch with reality I don't know where to begin. I also work at Google, making a similar amount as you do. To suggest that all you have to do to make $400K+ is "just know what to do, know where to be, and be willing to put in a lot of time and effort" is just ludicrous.

I guarantee you, and anyone else reading this, that with very little information I can predict with high accuracy how much money you make.

- Where you were born

- How much money your parents make

- Your health status at birth

- What college you went to, if applicable

- What you majored in while in college, if applicable

- How much your prioritize making money

I hate to say it, but the #1 predictor of your income is your parents' own situation. So if you want to make more money, be born to better parents. They will gift you the health, genetic advantages and socioeconomic circumstances that will statically make you succeed.

For everyone else, understand the rules of the game and bend them as much as possible. One thing I hate about working at Google is the sheer amount of out of touch engineers here. Everyone is so nice and friendly, but as soon as you talk about anything related to money you can see that some people are living, in a matter of speaking, on another planet.

EDIT: Looks like the post was edited to be removed. Basically the OP was saying he made 400K+ at Google and their significant other made another 200K as a car salesperson and they are both "run of the mill" at their jobs. The OP then goes on to say that if you try hard enough it's pretty easy to get to the position their at.

Ironically the reaction of removing the post is exactly the same sort of reaction I get in person in when money or money related matters is ever the subject of a conversation with someone who is an engineer at Google. If a non-engineer is in the conversation the engineer will just say life isn't fair and leave.

IQ matters a lot too. People who make a lot of money tend to be smarter than the general population, such as doctors or software developers. A car salesman may make $200k but these tend to be huge outliers. The median tech workers does better than the median car salesman. Commission work is a bitch.

Meanwhile, the truly wealthy pass down fortunes to their children who show no outward signs of exceptional intelligence or skill.

I’d also imagine those with the highest IQs in American society are academics in STEM fields, who are hardly rich by the measure of our current inequality.

"Where you were born"

The cost of living is different everywhere. You could live like a king in a country like Cambodia and be barely middle class in the US.

"How much money your parents make"

This doesn't really have to do much with success. I know plenty of people (myself included) that grew up with barely enough to scrape by and make much more than their parents.

"What college you went to, if applicable"

This helps, of course. Mostly because it is an example of being able to start and finish something that's difficult and stick with it until the end. Someone that can do this will most likely be successful in other areas of life.

You also have companies like Google looking down on anyone that doesn't come from an elite college, which only makes it more difficult for everyone.

"How much your prioritize making money"

This is a big factor, but it is a choice. I have a friend that is college educated and intelligent. Hates the idea of making money and works a minimum wage job at 35 years old. The only reason she isn't living in poverty is because her husband is a manager at a major corporation and makes really good money.

"For everyone else, understand the rules of the game and bend them as much as possibly"

What a terrible outlook on life. The Internet has made it so anyone can start a business with almost no money. Instead of taking advantage of this, too many people waste their days on social media and instead try to lobby the government to give them a pay wage increase.

> This doesn't really have to do much with success. I know plenty of people (myself included) that grew up with barely enough to scrape by and make much more than their parents.

A lot of people like yourself, who grow up poor say this. However you're wrong. It's not to say that your success is predetermined entirely by your parents' socioeconomic status, but it's a large (and according to many scholars, the largest) predictor. Also, I have to say the usual disclaimer that correlation is not causation and all that.

In general I'd say hard work is necessary, but not sufficient to succeed.

Source: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/hendren/files/mobility_geo...

"A lot of people like yourself, who grow up poor say this. However you're wrong"

Yeah, well, I have plenty of examples that prove otherwise.

"In general I'd say hard work is necessary, but not sufficient to succeed."

Hard work is always necessary for success. Unless your parents or relatives are giving you money..nobody will just hand it to you.

@newfeatureok, @onlyrealcuzzo, @unclemeat (and perhaps others)

Slightly off-topic, but curious. Are you quoting salaries, or the amount you've been earning including stock/options you've been granted and how it has performed?

> absolute top echelon of your field assuming also that you are in a lucrative field

Congratulations! You’re in the top echelon of your field, and it’s a lucrative field. Of all the engineering gigs in the world, you’re at one of the top companies making a top salary.

I know it feels weird because from the inside there are so many FAANG employees. You don’t feel special. But you are! This is a special position you’re in, and it’s great that you’re taking advantage of it.

I work at Google. I make 450k per year.

In high school I experienced severe depression. My first psychiatrist prescribed me antidepressants that didn't work well and caused me to have auditory hallucinations. I went on antipsychotics that made things worse.

It took two years to resolve everything and find a doctor and a medicine that worked for me. During this time

1. My mother was a homemaker and could spend a large amount of time driving me to doctors that were far away from home. She was also able to coordinate extended leaves with my high school (I missed an entire month straight at one point).

2. My parents made a lot of money. We were able to afford a psychiatrist who didn't take our insurance, spending thousands of dollars a month on bills.

3. My parents and several extended family members had personally experienced depression and were able to empathize well with my experience rather than telling me to suck it up. I had continual support from them.

If some of these things go the other way, I don't graduate high school.

Add this to all the myriad of other privileges I experienced along the way and I very much did not end up making a mountain of money at Google by just trying hard.

Or investing. Tesla stock is at 650 and had you invested just 10 years ago after it went public you would have made 31x your money. Such stories are rare but is one way of getting rich. Same for investing in Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc. It is hard to generalize this to a rule that can be applied, but investing in software or social networks, which have market dominance and scale well, is a good strategy. large tech companies that have network effects, wide moats, and market dominance.

There’s no reason anyone would have believed 10 years ago Tesla will get so big. You have to be already rich to afford to take such risks that will allow you to have one big hit, or have the kind of intimate knowledge of the market to allow consistent winnings to get rich from multiple smaller hits. Which implies it’s likely you could have gotten just as rich in many other ways. Without knowing who’s the Facebook and who’s the MySpace getting rich by investing is not very much unlike getting rich by winning the lottery.

I think most riches come as a combination of hard work/smarts and right place and right time (or luck), in varied proportions.

look at wallstreetbets. people do it consistent and at a rate that exceeds chance/luck. They look for companies that have market dominance and strong growth and are ubiquitous, such as Amazon, and then aggressively buy call options on it. Sometimes they sloe money but the payoffs can be huge and consistent.

That falls under "ownership of the means of production".

Eh, that's a bit defeatist.

Really, it's easier than ever to start your own business (own your production). Most people reading this could begin today.

It's even possible to retire in your 30s via an average salary. Look into Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE).

Is not having to work anymore not a sufficient definition of rich? Though IMO having control over your schedule and not having to work for someone else is pretty close too.

Owning a business is a literal definition of ownership of the means of production.

You forgot luck, like the person who mined some bitcoin in 2010 and sold it in 2017.

A mechanism you haven't enumerated is use other people's money to buy an income stream. The easiest case being using the banks' money to buy a rental income stream.

Or be skilled in luck.

Or by buying a house young in a NIMBY society.

I can't see housing as "means of production".

I was going to say the majority of people in the UK who've gone from nothing much to >£1m (dunno if that's rich) it's been through property, mostly buying a place, renting it out, buying another.

Like I've got a friend, 40ish, works in education hiring teachers etc on a normal salary but every 5 to 10 years has bought a place on a mortgage and now it's worth that. She's not even entrepreneurial especially, just had the sense to do that when the opportunity was there.

You shouldn't shun nice things, but you should definitely shun buying those things to prove anything to anyone. That is the disease that so many people (at least in the US) seem to have now worse than ever. Stop using the little money you have to prove to others that you have it. Isn't it funny how people will bankrupt themselves to try to make people think they aren't bankrupt?

Much of the premise of the 1996 book "The Millionaire Next Door" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door)

I'm currently going back to school and I'm noticing it a lot on my campus. Lots of people travel or own mustangs or newer cars. I believe most of them are just using a parents car or something however it boggles my mind nobody considers the long term effects of that. Although I currently drive a real shoddy beater of a truck, I'd like something better simply because for dates and stuff, I'd come across as someone who isn't a total cheapass you know? However I can't justify doing it because I know buying used vehicles in my price range can be a total crapshoot.

This seems like a silly article. No one is making pronouncements like "you should never ever buy a new car regardless of your income / wealth" or "not making small daily purchases like lattes is the cornerstone of a sound financial plan". What they are saying is that you should be aware of how much those purchasing habits ultimately cost you and make an informed decision. A lot of people who are not Kawhi Leonard never consider how such purchases impact their financial well being.

Spending scolds don't just come out and tell people to not buy new cars or lattes. It's almost always in response to a complaint by someone that they are having trouble making ends meet. The advice is spurned because they aren't atually trying to solve a near-term budgeting problem, they really are just expressing jealousy of richer people, and in particular jealousy of their richer lifestyle. As such, any advice suggesting they adjust down their own lifestyle (which is easier than trying to earn more, as it is more fully under your own control) is to them offensive and is going in the wrong direction. I take this from two data points in my personal dealings, which is a small dataset, but considering I've never had anybody actually need and use budgeting advice I suspect it's broadly true.

TO ADD: I'm not saying nobody has a budgeting problem, I'm saying that those who don't take seriously the advice to curtail spending probably have more of a jealousy problem than a budgeting problem.

"Having trouble making ends meet" and "being dissatisfied with one's disposable income" are simply orthogonal issues. Fixing your budget is a way to deal with issue 1. Living beyond your means does not really address issue 2 either (your dissatisfaction and envy): it's just giving you additional problems to deal with, that are going to stress you out and make it even harder to earn more money. It's a really, really dumb thing to do.

The "don't buy a house" crowd really cracks me up. I bought my first house in 1991 for $100k outside of San Fran. I'm on my fourth house, having lived >5 years in each one. Subtracting MINOR remodeling, maintenance, and interest (excluding mortgage interest ded.) I've cleared about $500k of tax free profit.

Now could I start this today? It would be way harder for me to start this today. The housing markets where the good jobs are have gone bonkers. But pretty much everyone I know who's bought modest houses since the early 90's as grown significant equity.

I'm excluding people that bought mcmansions or non 30-year fixed mortgages for houses they couldn't afford. Most of them got cornholed in 2001 and 2009. I think if you can do it, you should do it. The instances that led to fucking were rare and predictable.

No. 2. Prioritize investing for your future

Simple, right. But how does this play out over a longer time horizon? How about the family fortune? Is having a mortgage you can barely afford to live in a decent school district and increase your childrens' earning power a wise investment?

It's at best extremely risky and no guarantee of your childrens' success, with poor failure modes.

No? Even nice public schools aren’t great (there are some extreme exceptions but most are mediocre.)

Send your kid to a good private school or homeschool co-op (essentially the same thing) and stop doing dumb things with real-estate. Be involved in their hobbies and try to communicate the important ideas you’ve learned, no school can replace that and it’s one of the most powerful ways you can improve your child’s future. (This is intuitively obvious, but I think there are also a number of moderately recent studies to back it up.)

A "good private school" isn't cheap, about $20k/year on average [1]. If you have 2 children, then spending an extra $3k/yr to get a good school district is a cheaper option than private school.

[1] Actually, I'm pulling this number from average private school prices. And the average private school is probably only as good quality as "nice public schools [that] aren't great." But I don't have a good comparison since the public school district I grew up in contained several schools in the top 100 in the nation.

That’s why included the homeschool co-ops, they tend to be a lot cheaper although they usually expect parents to do a lot of volunteer work.

There’s not just a monetary cost to moving to a nicer school district, often that can mean a lot more driving which means absorbing a lot of risk (accidents, maintenance) and burning more fuel and time.

> It is all about living within your means,

No, it's about spending wisely. Ask not "can I afford it?", but "is it worth it?" (taking into account, yes, your financial situation). This article hasn't done much to convince me that a brand new car is worth the huge markup.

If you want a fine take on this subject, and one that is much better than the comments so far, read The Millionaire Next Door. https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Amer...

I must have missed all those stories of people saving for decades to leave fortunes behind.

Taking financial guidance as a middle class wage earner from a trust fund baby is probably also a bad idea.

Checkout out the financialindependence subreddit. You will find plenty of average folks with 7 figures in savings and investments: https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/

Yeah but what of it? If you're 35 and live frugally ($3k/mo) you still need more than $1.3m to never work again, and that assumes you don't live longer than average.

That is definitely achievable by someone working in the software industry. Perhaps not by 35, but certainly by 45 or 50, which is still very early retirement.

Some guy called David Bach apparently made a whole self-help carrier on the latte thing.

https://www.thelattefactor.com/

Or, the subject of astonishing wealth inequality could be addressed instead of blaming those already struggling.

"blaming those already struggling"

Those struggling need to take some of the blame or the situation will never change. I know many people that if you gave them a million dollars today, they would spend a million and one.

There needs to be a culture shift away from excessive consumerism. You need pretty much 100% of the female population to get on board with that though in order for men to follow suit too.

This really depends a lot on location I would think.

In the North of England an expensive car might cost as much as a house.

In London it might be two years' rent.

If you live in an area with high rents then almost everything else is irrelevant by comparison unless you really throw money about, but that's not true everywhere.

In Silicon Valley, the down payment on a house could buy you a mansion pretty much anywhere else in the US. In Florida, you could get a waterfront mansion in many places.

Having just bought a tank of Petrol in Scotland, I kind of feel the gasoline cost as much as a house.

The headline amuses me, because it implies the goal of life is to get rich.

I read it more as “Of the people who are rich, none of them got there by not buying new cars and lattes”.

Some people get rich while buying new cars, but only every 15-20 years.

I think you’re projecting.

“No one accomplishes X by doing Y” does not imply that the goal of life is X.

That's quite the extrapolation.

Not everyone has the same goals, but for some of us it definitely is.

The wisest man I met in my life was a 65 year old cab driver in Washington DC who was about to retire with $3m in the bank. He saved 10% of his income from the day he started working and didn't buy lattes or sports cars.

Yes, you most definitely can get rich by not drinking lattes. This article is a disservice.

Maybe for the author of this article, a $6 latte is "within his means". For most of the world, it's not because they're not saving 10% of every paycheck, so they should minimize discretionary spending until they do.

My friend and ex-neighbor Tim has worked in a blue collar machine operator near-minimum-wage job his entire life. But he's frugal as hell, never buys new things, considers coffee a waste of money. At 55 he has two houses and upwards of a million in cash and investments. It not at all uncommon.

55 yo, you say? When did he buy his houses?

If we're being absurdly generous, let's say the cab driver makes $70k/year, after taxes, for 40 years. 10% of that doesn't add up to any million.

But plenty of folks do save a lot by shunning new cars and lattes

I think the car rule is more often don't by a 50k car if you make 50k a year.

Also related, cars go down in value. They are cool to own but by no means an investment. They are a utility to get you around and more specifically to your job that actually does make you money. The biggest rule though they stated first is huge. If you are making 300k a year, buy that 50k car or save up for a relatively "short while" and get a 100k car.

As someone who wasted a large amount of money on cars in his younger years...

The problem with buying a $50k (or whatever the vehicle you want) car, is that you will probably grow bored with it and want another one in two years.

And chances are that $50k car is going to depreciate like a rock. And be expensive to insure. And you'll also have the bad habit of spending even more money on modifications/customizations etc.

Buying a brand new, expensive vehicle isn't the worst idea if you keep it for ten years, drive it every day, etc. But if it's a thing you drive a few times a month, is impractical, and you get rid of it in 1-3 years for the newest model, it's financial suicide.

I never got $35k of 'enjoyment' out of a new car purchase. And they aren't brand new for very long.

The title should be "No One Gets NBA Basketball Player Rich by Shunning New Cars and Lattes," but that wouldn't get as many clicks.

And IMO, being able to retire and live comfortably with your savings is rich; a good touch of frugality helps drive the very first point in the article, which is: spend less than you earn. This doesn't require tens of millions or more; a handful will do just fine, and not buying $40k cars is a great way to help get there. Most of the world doesn't have this kind of retirement. A good portion of the US doesn't have that.

And plenty of professional athletes do go broke buying (too many, too fancy) new cars and houses etc.

When I was a student, buying lattes would have significantly hurt my freedom. My stress level would be higher and I may have struggled to graduate before running out of money.

After building a career, worrying about lattes was a waste of effort. But buying a nice car would have limited my freedom. For example, I would not have bought as much investment real estate and I would probably be >$500K poorer.

But worrying about buying new cars probably won't make sense for me soon.

Avoiding lattes and new cars was, in fact, very important for my finances (in the past, but not now). The article acknowledges the importance of individual circumstances:

> What should determine personal spending is the totality of the buyer’s financial circumstances.

But the headline risks misleading people.

What a tone-deaf and bizarre article.

It begins with a straw-man: "as I financier I often encounter people who equate buying lattes and new cars with financial suicide"

It then boldly introduces a distinction: there's a difference between spending and spending beyond one's means... literally, and I quote:

> Simply saying no to consumption is lazy and thoughtless. What should determine personal spending is the totality of the buyer’s financial circumstances.

I don't think anyone lives in this simple-minded universe, torn between the deadly sin of exuberant spending (on things!) and the austere life of impoverished simplicity.

Money is a means. It has no intrinsic worth. We all understand this, keenly.

Teach your 18 year old to pick 5 companies they think will be around in 15 years. Stick some money into each and don’t touch it. Taking money out of great stocks because I thought it was too expensive has been the greatest mistake I made

Statistically, your 18 year old would be much better off in a Vanguard broad market index fund. The chances that they’re going to pick 5 companies that outperform the market is pretty remote.

But a concentrated portfolio is actually more likely to beat an index. So besides a 401k, do what I suggested

Got a source on that? It contradicts most research I've seen. Obviously the right concentrated portfolio will beat an index...but that's the trick, isn't it?

I don't think it's correct to say it's not good to buy lattes or new cars, but I think we should be aware of what it costs you verses the alternative.

I think it's common knowledge that new cars deprecate extremely quickly, so for most middle class individuals it's better to go with a used car to avoid losing loads of money in the long run.

A medium latte costs at least $3. For daily drinkers that's about $90/month, which is at least triple the value of the beans and milk it took to produce.

Frugal living alone doesn't make you rich but I think it can really help you if you're in debt (like most Americans)

I wonder how people become so deluded that a major news publication needs to tell them this. Surely if it were reasonably easy to become rich by refusing lattes, several people from your social circle would have done it already and you could just ask them.

A good size of the population should be able to get to $1m-$5m of net worth by retirement by being disciplined with a 0-based budget, avoiding debt (mortgage is an exception) and steadily investing in your retirement.

Keep it simple.

Yet the median balance that fiftysomethings carry in their 401(k) is 60 kUSD: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/01061...

That tells you that it isn't easy to save an adequate balance for retirement, despite what Suze Orman and all the other avocado toast shunners tell you.

I don’t think it is easy at all. At least in America, all the forces are working get you to spend all your current and future money.

I wish we would talk more about how it’s possible than how hard it is.

Net worth would be more instructive than 401(k) balance, particularly since many people do not have access to a 401(k) for much of their career. I know more than a few people with meager 401(k) but large taxable accounts, real estate, business, etc portfolios.

It is a mistake to conflate retirement accounts with investments accessible in retirement. This is no different than the "Americans have no savings" trope, which conflates having savings accounts (which are an anachronism that many Americans have no use for) with having access to cash-like liquidity.

It doesn't look much rosier when you look at net worth: https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf

Median net worth in the 55-65 age bracket: 187 kUSD. Effectively, it's much less than that because the lion's share of these 187 kilodollars will be owner-occupied housing. Yes, you can sell up, but you'll always need a roof over your head.

The political system will have to deal with the retirement shortfall in the next 10 to 20 years.

The median US household has $1000/month left after all ordinary expenses. Investing even half of that is enough to fund a reasonable retirement.

-- It's financial suicide to own a house

-- Don't send your kids to college

Those two are especially stupid

No, but shunning new cars and lattes can give you the focus to do something that does get you rich.

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