[ChuckMcM]

It is important to consider that once you put something away it can start earning money on its own. So if you work backwards, lets assume you save your 25K/year in your 401k and you add 25K/year in just part of your income. That is 50K/year which when you are young is perhaps half your salary and 20 years later is perhaps 1/4th or 1/5th (assuming you go from making $100K / year early on and eventually get to $200K /year). If you look at the S&P500 [1] and no-load or zero load ETFs, you can get an average annualized rate of return of ~ 7%. Do the math (here is a convenient web site: https://www.budgetworksheets.org/invest/) and after 20 years you've got $2.1M saved. You started at 22 and you ended at 42 and now you have 10x your ending salary of $200K/year saved. When you are young and have no dependents you can save a ton of money, and the more you save, the earlier you save it, the more it piles up at the end when you need it. A couple of big signing bonuses when changing jobs, a bit of gain from the stock purchase plan. It isn't as far out of reach as you might imagine.

The other thing to be careful of is the who "bought real estate in the '80s, those days are long gone" kind of things. If you bought real estate in Denver in 2010 you're doing pretty well right now. If you bought 10,000 shares of Facebook stock when they IPO'd and held it (that was only 6 years ago) it would be worth over $1.75M today. I'm not trying to exploit my hindsight, I'm trying to share with you that large changes in investment value happen all the time, markets change. So you should not tell yourself that such opportunities are "mostly unavailable now" they are just as available now as they were then. Sometimes you will win and sometimes you won't but if you are reasonably diversified in your investment plan you can take advantage of a growing economy.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...