This is a good point if you make the assumption that people tend to accumulate wealth as they age as a rule. I think this is likely, but it has not been establ

This is a good point if you make the assumption that people tend to accumulate wealth as they age as a rule. I think this is likely, but it has not been established as a general proposition. The shapes of individual "wealth curves" will not necessarily be identical. Here are a few examples to consider: - A person who is raised in a middle-class home, and has basically the life story in the blog post will have a curve similar to that one. - A person who is raised in a poor home, is unable to afford college even with loans, and makes a few bad economic decisions early on, though not so bad that he cannot pay for them, will have a similar-looking debt event, followed by little change for the rest of his life. - A person who is raised in a wealthy home, goes to college without needing loans, and is taught from an early age the value of savings and investment will have a much steeper exponential curve, and a much flatter "retirement decline". - A person who is raised in a poor home, is unable to afford college even with loans, and makes catastrophic economic decisions will likely either declare bankruptcy or end up in prison. Either event resets wealth accumulation to an unspecified negative value (to account for the stigma and reduced access to various opportunities), yielding a significantly different curve. - A person who is raised in a rich home, with a trust fund, but whose trust fund was invested in real estate and Bernie Madoff. - A person living the Equalland scenario encounters a catastrophic financial event at some point (illness, crime, failure of an over-leveraged investment such as a home) and is driven considerably into debt. Servicing that debt will require either a significant portion of income thereafter or bankruptcy. - A person living the Equalland scenario, except that his chosen field of education is overproduced in his generation, will have a similar curve to the fourth scenario above. The education debt does not necessarily produce benefits thereafter. I do think the Equalland scenario is likely to be most common, but I recognize that my suspicions are likely influenced by the fact that it is the most common scenario amongst my peers. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that it is the overwhelmingly most common scenario in general, especially with so many different scenarios resulting in a net wealth loss over the course of a person's life.