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You Likely Won’t Be A Millionaire

The deck isn’t quite “stacked” against you, but there’s stuff you should realize.

Ted Bauer
4 min readJul 26, 2024

New paper from the St. Louis Fed (that’s a thing?) on how your age affects your income. Let’s start with something basic that no one ever really acknowledges, best I can tell: unless you have an inheritance or work in about 4–5 specific fields, it’s typically pretty hard to have a boatload of money before you’re 40–45 or so (and even then, it’s hard). You gotta work your way up the chain, and stuff like vacations/kids/horrible decisions around going to happy hour and staying till 10pm will cut into your finances. I make a decent salary relative to what I do, and I still often feel like I’m paycheck-to-paycheck. I’m 34, if you care.

Here’s the methodology behind everything:

The paper, by William Emmons, Bryan Noeth and Ray Boshara, draws on surveys of 40,000 families that the Fed carried out between 1989 and 2013 to examine the all-important role that your age plays in how much income you make and how much wealth you accumulate. It offers a few clues as to how young people can game the system and

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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