"the interest on your debt is always higher than any return on any hypothetical investment you might make with savings (which you can never justify allocating).

"the interest on your debt is always higher than any return on any hypothetical investment you might make with savings (which you can never justify allocating)." This wouldn't necessarily be the case if poor people had access to 401(k)s with matching contributions. But even when they do have "access" to investment accounts it's really rare to have matching contributions of any kind. And yeah, even if they had it they still couldn't necessarily afford to pay into it. When I finally had excess income I got a guaranteed ~10% rate of return by paying off my credit card debt. And that's what I did instead of investing. (That, and buying a new mattress.)