What does any of this mean? Greetings from Europe.
Everything is not perfect in the singular country of Europe, I sure as hell don't want to be relying on only what the state decides it can give me in my old age.
No complaints, I know how much I saved, projections on how my pension will look like if I retire in year X, Y or Z. I don't expect more from a good social security system if one wants more it should be on them.
So far plan is retiring at 60, already I work on 90% and thus sporting 10 weeks of paid vacations yearly. That way, I don't thread the knife edge of burnout, in contrary and have plenty of time to unwind, have adventures (just came back from 2 weeks road trip in Dominican republic) and spend literal months on vacations with my kids and wife. There is no salary achievable in our field that would force me to consider it a better setup and instead working hard... these are best years of my remaining life and waste them just working would be tremendously stupid and shortsighted. To retire in 45, seeing my skills atrophied and being at the mercy of things like inflation... doesn't sound that great.
So there is another perspective to just chasing biggest paycheck at all costs.
The 100k is just a number that means 'doing well for yourself in the local market and for the work you do'. From what I understood the 'retire at 45' is something separate.
(that's the other thing, state pension age is being pushed back as life expectancy increases. Not for the main boomer generation of course, they were already retired when the age started to creep up or only had to work a few months longer)
they were being sarcastic.
For investments, you invest post-tax and pay capital gains when withdrawing.
Then more recently (as in, as of around 2012 and up to 2018) we got auto-enrollment into private pensions, which are more like Defined Contribution (DC). Employer has to pay a percentage into the pot and so do you. Usually 5% employee and 3% employer by default but many will offer better (or contribution matching) as a perk. I think this is probably the same or similar to the 401k in US terms. The employer chooses the pension provider but you need to proactively switch to a high risk scheme to see any growth from it.
At a certain point the tax rebate from the government doesn't cover your whole income so you have to file a tax return to get the rest of the rebate. You can instead choose to 'salary sacrifice' which means you are lowering your income on paper but the sacrifice is put directly into pension (or otherwise can be used to get a car on lease or a bicycle via another scheme). Salary sacrifice is used by a lot of higher earners to bring their gross income down in order to avoid being cut off on certain benefits like child-care.
After all that you have SIPP (Self-Invested Personal Pension) which gives you more control over what you can invest it. Not just stocks, ETFs, and all that, but can also be commercial property (so the pension itself owns that asset). This gets the same tax treatment for pensions.
Finally there is the ISA and LISA. The first is a savings account where any interest or capital gain is free of tax, the second gets a 25% boost by the government to help buy a house or flat, but you can only use that money for a mortgage deposit.
Most people won't see all that much from their auto-enrollment given they could just opt-out to get the extra cash in their paycheque (especially when a low earner), or might not know to switch to the high risk fund, so the state pension and other benefits for OAPs will be there still. Those with more disposable income or a long term view (e.g. doing FIRE) are likely to max out the various vehicles available to them but at that point you're gonna be earning too much to care.
No need to optimise healthcare costs or any of that unless you want to go private.
6 figures is possible, there are/were some software companies (VC backed, US based, US startup style, FAANG) that pay that much, otherwise there's highly paid jobs like management, doctors/dentists, landlord, public motivational speaker, drug dealer, etc that can earn you that much. But it's not handed to you like it feels like it is in the US / SF, but I realize that's very much a unique bubble.
So yeah, basically none of your comment is true, it's just not talked about as much because our basic systems are alright for most people and few have the extra income to think about doing more with it.
Of course some roles can earn six figures or more, hopefully everyone knows there isn't a hard cap on earnings. Should've been obvious that wasn't my claim.
The GP described tax optimizations for the highest earners. The idea that they would be better off in Europe is plainly ridiculous.