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> Consistent moderate savings on top tier income, sure. Do keep in mind that the context for this thread was software engineers. The median pay makes saving $1
by ericmay 5y ago
> Consistent moderate savings on top tier income, sure.
Do keep in mind that the context for this thread was software engineers. The median pay makes saving $10,000/year very, very achievable.
> “Software” includes a lot of different occupations, but most of the non-management ones have median compensation around or substantially below $100K; so you are suggesting most people are leaving upward of 10-20% on the table. That's...unlikely.
Below $100k sure, but closer to $60,000 or so which again makes this amount of savings very achievable. My first job out of college was exactly this amount and I was saving about $1,000/month in a MCOL city. And if you're making that amount and living in a HCOL of city you may need to consider changing your location. You might not like it, but that's reality.
> Asserting that that is easy in software would be more convincing if we were more than 20-30 years from a major industry crash, or had some structural guarantee of it not happening again.
This is only a problem if you happen to retire right when a market collapse happens. Even then you adjust your withdrawal rate or try to put retirement off a bit. For those saving 20-30 years, those market dips are buying opportunities as the ROI of the market compounds over time. Given what we know, there's no reason to assume things won't just keep chugging along, at least for the purposes of general discussion. You can say that it won't and give great reasons for that, but I think it's fair to state those up-front.
If you want to discuss specifics I think that would make sense, but given that the person your responding to and myself were speaking generally about the software engineering profession (sure maybe there's some confusion there but for my part I was speaking about software engineers) so obviously there's some generalizations and built-in assumptions that are pretty common in the finance space.