I think people underestimate lifetime earnings. Let’s assume 35 years of salary work to retire at 65 (it takes a while to get a career going an maybe a layoff and parental leave…) That would be about 125k a year. Make that a dual income family and that’s 2 people making 63k a year. It’s a bit hard to understand pre and post tax though because some of the calculations like retirement are pretax. And then factor in gains from investment…
So isn’t this calculation saying a 2 family income making median can live the dream? That’s not great for 50% of Americans and probably means a lesser proportion of Americans can attain the dream than before. But that number 4.4 million actually is not crazy high.
I think people underestimate lifetime earnings. Let’s assume 35 years of salary work to retire at 65 (it takes a while to get a career going an maybe a layoff and parental leave…) That would be about 125k a year. Make that a dual income family and that’s 2 people making 63k a year. It’s a bit hard to understand pre and post tax though because some of the calculations like retirement are pretax. And then factor in gains from investment…
So isn’t this calculation saying a 2 family income making median can live the dream? That’s not great for 50% of Americans and probably means a lesser proportion of Americans can attain the dream than before. But that number 4.4 million actually is not crazy high.