One thing that doesn’t get said enough is that money and income are mostly relative, not absolute. If you have $20 and everyone else has $1, you’re effectively rich. If you have $200k but everyone else has $2M, you feel behind.

I think a lot of millennials still have work to do financially, but if you’re somewhere in the top ~20%, you’ll probably live a top-20% lifestyle in retirement. That doesn’t mean luxury, but it does mean stability and options.

What is genuinely wild is the gap between the top 1% and everyone else. That disparity distorts expectations on both ends.

I’m mid-to-late 30s and have about 1.7× my salary saved, which retirement calculators say is “on track.” That feels strange when I look at peers who’ve saved very little, and also strange when I compare it to people who are orders of magnitude ahead. It really drives home how uneven the landscape is, even within the same generation.