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He didn’t say high COL city, he said high COL country.

Plenty of people retire without engineering salaries in the US. $5k/month after taxes and expenses can be enough (or it can be a fraction of what you need).

Agree that thinking of it as a never ending money tap is the bigger issue.

But yeah if you gave me $10k/month pre-tax today (assuming it was never-ending) I’d be done working for the rest of my life.

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US social security pays about $3k/mo, so $1k/mo post-tax pre-expenses is not just enough to retire but also typical. These are real numbers from a real person (unmarried) in my life. They own their house, have about $200k in retirement assets (generating that $12k/yr in income) and otherwise have a fine life which is spent mostly gardening and helping parent grandkids. People are not rich!

The main issue with this narrative is that social security is on track to be insolvent in less than a decade. If that happens, then the long-tail of regular non-rich people are going to be in a world of hurt.

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