'Let's now assume that from 65 onward, a person depletes their savings by 4% every year'.
But this shows that in fact, you do need other forms of wealth...at least to retire at 65.
But this shows that in fact, you do need other forms of wealth...at least to retire at 65.
What we should be looking for is information about how each quantile in a given cohort is doing compared to their older counterparts at the same point in their lives. It's not enough to know that people under 40 own 10% of the wealth, you have to know how much of the wealth people under 40 owned in 2000, and 1980, and 1960, and 1940. And how that compares to their portion of the population. For example, we might expect to see a sort of "wealth bubble" around the baby boomer generation, which shows them having an outsized share of wealth at each stage relative to their older and younger cohorts. And we might expect that bubble to be correlated to the size of the baby boomer generation as a population.
So you're at $60k income and low housing costs. Doable for sure.
But I would point out that given that I did ignore a number of factors that should skew the wealth distribution even more towards the older generations, one could argue the fact that the numbers played out as close as they did to just a basic simple 4% annual to retirement and 4% down in retirement calculation means that younger generations are actually doing better now than they should be doing. Of course we would need to look at where the wealth we expect the older generations to have has gone to say for certain but in either case, the original quoted numbers don't seem nearly as terrible as they appear at first read.