Huh ... that's interesting.
How much retirement savings would one reasonably expect a 21 year old person to have? Do you suppose that maybe including people who have worked only a handful of years in the same cohort as people who have worked for many decades might produce some skewed statistics? Is it possible that perhaps someone is lying with statistics?
Hey FReepers! What did your retirement savings look like when you were 21?
ZERO for me and my wife-to-be at age 21. We were still undergrads in college and still had no savings at age 30 after graduate school (me) and medical school (her) were completed. But we made up for it.
“Hey FReepers! What did your retirement savings look like when you were 21?”
$0.
I can’t remember how old I was when I first opened a retirement account, but I think maybe 26. Even by 30, my balance was pretty pathetic (maybe like $15,000, I can’t totally remember). 25 years later, most folks outside the top 1% would be impressed with my balances. Nothing extraordinary was done... just regular saving and blue-chip investing.
At 21? $zero
My retirement account started 20+ years later when I retired from active military service.