After 12 years at Google I have a couple million$ in my account so I afford to not give a fuck.
A post that says I'm leaving with $700K would hit different than I'm leaving with $30M.
People underestimate the costs of life in the USA and use median incomes as evidence, but that really just means it’s harder for those making median to get by, it’s tough out there these days.
2 million at a conservative 3.5% withdrawal rate pays for 70k expenses a year. Not counting social security. With no mortgage and no rent in a lcol area that's probably enough. Odds are the 2 million grows rather than shrinks.
In the worst case scenario (traditional), $70k of withdrawals would be taxed the same as $70k of income. So this would be enough savings for someone who was making $70k before retirement. Probably actually better, because the person wouldn't have to save some of the withdrawals for retirement, and would get social security.
Not for Seattle or Los Angeles. But for most of the US, you will have a retirement income way above what you need. And that's a good thing, because according to the Federal Reserve, the average retirement savings of people 65-74 is about $600,000.
Of course retirement plans are going to tell you it's not enough. That's like ranchers telling you you're not eating enough beef.
> People underestimate the costs of life in the USA and use median incomes as evidence, but that really just means it’s harder for those making median to get by, it’s tough out there these days.
Clearly you're not thinking about all of the US. There are families of four leading happy, healthy lives on $80K out here. They don't use DoorDash three times a week, and they don't buy $8 cups of coffee, but they're doing just fine.
It is cute you think a couple millions dollar is a lot.
My friend worked at palantir as a senior eng for 4 years and already earned that.
This guy is a senior staff engineers at Google for 12 years. Easily earning >$1m per year.
And utterly disgusting to see how far removed from reality some people here are. A million dollars is life changing money for the vast majority of the population, and well beyond what most engineers earn.
Let us assume that you earn 16 USD per hour and you work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week, you would earn 33280 USD per year before taxes and deducations. Nowhere near a damn million.
There's also a difference between retirement savings and net worth. I'd guess there was a jump in "house poor" millionaires over the last few years.
The Fed has a Survey of Consumer Finances which can graph net worth broken down by perentile. You're right that even $1M net worth is not the majority, but top 25%ile:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm?mod=arti...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...
Probably more millionaires in the last few years with inflation though.
This is all US-centric; the author, Richard, is in Japan; I'm not sure how net worth, savings, retirement, or taxes are in Japan.
Lifestyle creep is what locks people into miserable tech jobs and eliminates risk taking and chasing dreams. Probably part of the reason that big companies lose the ability to innovate.