The maintaining same living standards thing is somewhat misleading too. Like I live in DC, which is very expensive, but I earn so much more by living here, it’s well worth it. If/when I retire, I can happily move to back to Phoenix or other mid-size city with much lower cost of living, and I can maintain the same…

Better to plan for it to completely implode and not be there for you, than to assume that 100% of promised benefits will be paid out in 2057 or whenever you retire.

You know what they say—just make the contribution up front, i.e. pay the retirement accounts first and you may find that you won’t miss it if it never hits the checking account. YMMV.

If it was in the post or in the Investopedia link I missed it, but here’s the actual survey from June 2018, which goes into a LOT more than just average 401k balances: https://www.transamericacenter.org/docs/default-source/retirement-survey-of-workers/tcrs2018_sr_18th_annual_worker_compendium.pdf

I’ll go beyond the clickbait, do the 12 seconds of googling, and actually deliver on the headline, here’s a link to the PDF of the report cited. So you can actually compare. (And here’s the 2019 version, since the info in this article is over a year old.)

This is just people bragging. Old millenial, and I’m just happy to have a positive net worth. Most of my friends don’t. If everything turns out ok, I might hit the millenial average in a few years. But shit is mostly luck. If I’m lucky, I won’t face any more random life events that completely drain my savings or…

These are good suggestions, especially the car debt advice. My wife and I have both kept our cars for at least 7-8 years, on average. All that extra money from not having a car payment goes into retirement or regular savings, which are well-funded and healthy. Meanwhile, both of our parents have small retirement…

GenX, 45 years old. Equipment Technician for a semiconductor manufacturing company in Phoenix (factory worker). Single, no kids. $120K salary, $500K in retirement accounts, $30K in cash, $1M+ in assets (house, cars, retirement, cash). Net worth of ~$725K. Saving 17% into the 401K (wish I had saved more than 6% in my…

YNAB is the best. I thought I was good with money but I got even BETTER after I started using it.