To your point about retirement savings- 401k contributions max out at around $20k per year and generally increase a little bit each year. Currently it’s $22,500. If one were to max out their 401k every year from age 20 to age 55 (35 years), they’d have a whopping… $875,000 (at an average annual max of let’s say 25k). For the sake of simplicity I’m not accounting for the contribution limit increasing each year, but I’m also not accounting for inflation, meaning you can think of the 875k in 35 years as though it were today. Everybody knows you can’t comfortably retire on $875k, even with a paid-off house and a paid-off car, you’d get 20-25 years out of that amount… if you retire at 55, that only gets you to 75-80, which is close to average in the US, but average just means half of us will live to be older than that. So two takeaways here: 1. Ain’t nobody retiring at 55. 2. Retiring is realistic when the stock market delivers its trademark gains, but elsewhere in the world, index funds often net you around 0% ROI over a span of multiple decades (see Japan’s NIKKEI from 1995 to 2020- flat). I’m not forgetting about social security, our politicians are. I wish I could opt out of it.