by Conundrum5
According to a compounding calculator I just tried, someone who starts with $0 at age 25 and adds 10k a year until age 60 to an investment account with a yearly average ROI of 5% will end up with just shy of a million at age 60. 5% is a fairly conservative estimated yearly return.
But according to this net worth by age calculator, only 20% of people in their 60’s in the US are millionaires in terms of net worth. dqydj.com/net-worth-by-age-calculator-united-states/
I’m certainly not saying that everyone is in a position to add 10k per year to an investment account, but I’d have thought that more than 20% of the population would be in a position to do that. Plus this is a net worth calculator that counts home equity, meaning home value is included in the estimate for home owners
So what’s going on here? Are more people living paycheck to paycheck than I realize? Are people just really not that good at saving much?
EDIT: here are some more conservative numbers. If you start at age 30 (rather than 25) and save 5k per year, with a fairly conservative estimate of 5% returns per year which arguably accounts for a few % of inflation each year, you’d have 350k by age 60 and 634k by age 70, which according to the calculator linked above is a lot closer to the median percentile (60-70 percentile in this case)