First, kudos on getting to the cusp of “a very comfortable retirement” as a 60-something.

To your objections, first, you might have missed it Jaynee, but I accounted for that difference by reducing the income needed to retire by 80%, partially because you no longer need to set aside money for retirement once you’re retired!

Second, it’s very human for all of us to see our situation as “normal” and think that everyone else has some similar version of the same. In reality, after conversing with people from very different situations, I’ve identified several advantages I had that many do not:

• I was born to a middle-class family who helped me get advanced degrees without any student debt
• The “genetic lottery” was reasonably kind to me
• As a kid, my family visited the US for three years, allowing me to gain native-speaker proficiency in English, making me fully bilingual

If you’re honest with yourself, in all but the most extreme cases, you owe at least some (and possibly a lot) of whatever success you’ve achieved to such factors or others that I may not share — e.g., being born into wealth, being incredibly attractive, being mentored by truly accomplished people who open their network to you, etc.

All that said, you can be born into the most extreme privilege but fritter away that incredible gift and never make anything of yourself beyond mastering hedonistic consumption.

Thus, if you’re successful, more than likely it’s the outcome of a combination of factors, some of which are privilege and others of which are making the right choices, showing up, and doing the hard work.