The Prison of Financial Mediocrity
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Extra words rarely have more content, only potential surprises - forcing your reader to go through it all in case of something unexpected..
LLM use doesn’t help you stand out. To make your writing professional in 2025, use as few words as possible.
When you sum up all the verbiage, regardless of its original or embellished content & meaning, it could just as well be titled The Enclosure Of Outsized Financial Ambition.
Maybe his LLM is trying to tell him something, like peoples' idea when it comes to rewarding greed is really just mediocrity in wolf's clothing.
This was already old news during the dot com era. The question is whether 401k plans and job-hopping still works out in the end.
To do that, though, you need to be able to switch jobs enough times, which isn’t easy when jobs are hard to find.
It can, but it is a fragile "still works out in the end." It fails when a damaging event occurs near the time you need the money, such as a late-in-life divorce, job loss, illness, or financial collapse of investment vehicles. Winning at the 401(k) game means enough people losing their money through unlucky investments, and you get a cut of their losses.
Thought experiment: imagine everyone had enough income that they could save 10% in a 401 (k). BLS numbers say 10% of us wages is 1.1 trillion. Can you imagine the impact on the stock market if it received $1.1 trillion every year for 30 years? Where would that money be invested?
It’s no different than telling a desperate person to get on a boat where work and income are waiting for them, but in reality they will be enslaved once they reach their destination. We are rapidly heading this direction worldwide as more and more people become desperate and those in power will be waiting to take advantage of the situation.
The path to gathering wealth is simple, and anyone has a good chance of success. See Bogleheads.org for details. ( Once the path is clearly understood, discipline is the primary factor. You have to live below your means, there is no exception. Also, a long compounding timeframe is useful. )
You can live YOLO like the rabbit or you can live like Warren Buffet the tortoise. You don’t get rich quickly, you get rich slowly with large gains at the end, after compounding has done its magic.
Financial literacy is easy to obtain, but watch your sources. Trust the Bogleheads!
The people living on two dead end jobs that don't properly feed their families and leave them vulnerable to dismissal if their car breaks down so they can't get to work really do not have 'a good chance of success'.
They are not in a position to live below their means without imposing monastic levels of discipline and deprivation on their children.
Horatio Alger was a mythologist, not a documentarian.
But there are many, many people who can find financial success with a little knowledge and discipline. The FIRE community is full of people on all points on the journey.
On the other hand, giving up and spending what you make assures you won’t become wealthy.
For many people, it’s a choice. For a few, circumstances and bad luck drive the end result. I think it’s wise to prepare as if you’re in the capable majority, not the unfortunate minority.
That said:
>> When boomers hold ~50% of national wealth while comprising 20% of the population, and millennials hold ~10% despite being the same share, the game reveals itself to be fundamentally broken.
These numbers mean nothing. Also, the byproduct of billionaire-driven inequality is the collapse of the American Middle Class. That’s what’s under attack and the reason why the road is closed has nothing to do with those lucky enough to still make it into it. Look up, ffs.
While you’re right, there is work involved on the part of the boomers, the amount of leaving scorched earth for future generations is infuriating to watch.
This may be true but many just a few years earlier lost everything. The people who bought houses cheap were the ones who saved diligently just like you may be doing, who had money to take advantage of an opportunity. I was not one of these lucky ones but I can't fault people for making good financial decisions. If you want to be pissed at anyone, be pissed at the ones who bought houses they obviously couldn't afford, and the people behind the exorbitant loan issuances for overpriced houses. THAT is what we will ultimately suffer for. Not someone buying a house that they can afford at a time when everyone is desperate to get money.
I forget the exact numbers, but let's say ten billionaires own 50% of all the wealth in the US; how many of those folks are boomers?
That'd remarkably change this ratio if it were the case that much of this wealth is held by only a few very wealthy boomers.
Also I believe that actual surviving boomers are underrepresented in that 10% compared to the general population now. And that trend can be expected to continue predictably.
- Top 1% -> 31.0% of total US household wealth
- Top 10% but excluding the top 1% -> 36.4% of total US household wealth, i.e. the top 10% have 67.4% of total US household wealth
- The bottom 90% -> 32.6% of total US household wealth
Can we please stop pretending there's any fairness to any of it? That the reward is proportional to merit, effort, strength of character, utility, or any respectable and desirable quality? That everyone was on equal footing when trying to succeed?
That would be great, thanks.
It never was fair.
Tens of millions of boomers, if they could even get paying work during rampant inflation & recession, still had to work minimum-wage jobs for many years at rates like $2 per hour. With constant overtime or they wouldn't be able to make ends meet or have any kind of home equity now. Many for more than a decade before anything resembling recovery was on the horizon.
Most are still not homeowners and those that are, very few have it paid off completely even if they have been there more than 30 years.
The cool thing is that millions of others were in better positions, avoided the massive layoffs, and actually weren't dragged down as far by the predatory financial policies of the time. And there are whole neighborhoods of them today where it's still a free enough country where you often get to witness their eventual stately homes and selection bias where this kind of good fortune finally arrived after all this time.
In case not everyone remembers, the "great recession" of the 21st century was a nothingburger by comparison.
We may not all be on equal footing, but life is a game of skill and chance. It's easy to look at some people who, for example, made money from buying a house, while forgetting all those who didn't actually gain anything. Playing by the same rules is what makes it fair.
If you want to cry about something unfair, cry about inflation. It makes all the supposed "wealth" figures go up as everyone gets poorer. That sure isn't fair. It might be unavoidable at this late stage in our societal decay, but that is hardly any consolation.
Carry on. You need that to live.
Unfortunately that very belief is perpetuating the issue you’re complaining about, but your worldview may very well hinge on you not making the connection.
>Unfortunately that very belief is perpetuating the issue you’re complaining about, but your worldview may very well hinge on you not making the connection.
We just have different beliefs about what makes a thing fair. I think your worldview depends on tearing down the foundations of civilization, and I would like for you and everyone like you to recognize it sooner rather than later.
The rest of the article is about a different generation of folks and the current conditions/perceptions of those conditions.
Why make this about boomers? The article is not about them, nor is a brief factual mention of them unfair. Nor is the follow up sentence absolving them of responsibility for the one thing time are mentioned.
By pawning the future of their country and its economy: printing money, making the economy a casino and getting trillion dollar bailouts, outsourcing industry, basing the web on ad revenue, making a God out of the stock market and enshittifying everything in the process...
All we had were multi-million-dollar bailouts to go with that.
You know, the value of the dollar and all.
There was major presidential malfeasance and this thing called "inflation" back then too. It was devastating with no actual recovery since. Or young people wouldn't be complaining now.
Remember "yuppies" - the boomer ideology that dialed up consumerism and financialization of all aspects of life. Reaganomics? The 1989, 2000, and 2008 crashes? The Great Outsourcing? Also in the eve of 21st century, boomers were merely from 40 to 54, so well represented in all positions of power and business. Clinton and Bush J were boomers. And Boomers got more entrenched as time went by and as they reached their 50s and 60+ for the later ones.
Same in Europe too, were e.g. people like the French 68'rs (the youth of the late 60s student revolts, roughly similar to the same era youth in the US later turned yuppies), have been running things since the early 80s in the most selfish, destructive, and narcissistic ways.
These are the significant minority that prevailed both in the US and Europe.
There's always been plenty of them, and they have had some remarkable windfalls.
Who else was left with any chance of power to prevent your prominent, legendary old-timers from doing the damage they did?
Too many times they couldn't really be stopped from taking the reins any time they could, and steering things to their own advantage more so than anything else.
The great majority of everybody else was brought to the edge of ruin by all those financial disaters not of their own making.
Just like the decades-younger crowd today, it's the same type of greed playing out in the same way.