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.
While that’s more than reasonable to expect for techies, for example, in todays world, that’s CEO pay 35 years ago.
While I’m too lazy to do the math, I’d like to see
Median income is 76k per household, so no, a 2 job family making median cannot live the dream.
Add the expense of having kids.
Add the expense of looking after parents.
Add the expense of healthcare costs.
I would guess all of these are included in the 4.4 million