[ryandrake]

Not OP, but also almost 50. The ability to save doesn't tend to scale with income or age. Major costs like taxes, housing, healthcare and so on very efficiently and elastically scale up to soak your income, even as that income is rising. If you're living in the Bay Area and making a "typical" Bay Area comp, your rent cost is likely set by knowledgable local landlords to maximize the amount of that income they can sponge up. Health insurance works similarly.

Of course there are other good reasons for not being able to save. Medical debt, education debt, child support, parental support and so on.

Without guaranteed pensions, saving takes deliberate effort, deliberate avoidance of lifestyle creep, a lot of health luck, and a lot of luck in the market. Those savings vehicles you do manage to take advantage of, like 401(k)s and so on, are mostly inaccessible outside of the context of retiring. So anything you put into them is gone until you're elderly.