The median 40 year old has retirement savings of $45K, not $5K. And the median 70 year old has savings of $200K. In both groups, doubling the amount is quite significant.
Using median makes it a loaded statistic skewed in favor of the minority (in this case, the wealthy).
Over half the country is living paycheck-to-paycheck, so that median number is already in the ‘well-off’ category by default, making them irrelevant to the main point of discussion.
Is that true? Median is literally taking the value in the middle. So if there are 30 million 70 year olds then it would be picking the 15th millionth person and using their savings.
Averages or Means are skewed by outliers, not the median. The median is just picking the middle number in a list of numbers. There is no skewing possible. If you have 99 people making $1 per year and one person making $1B per year, the median is $1. The average/mean is $1,000,000.99 which is way skewed.
The median 40 year old has retirement savings of $45K, not $5K. And the median 70 year old has savings of $200K. In both groups, doubling the amount is quite significant.
Jesus Christ those are pathetic numbers for retirement at those ages.
Got to eat. Retirement is gone, and your 401k is nothing more than a subsidy so you can work part time as a greeter until death.
Using median makes it a loaded statistic skewed in favor of the minority (in this case, the wealthy).
Over half the country is living paycheck-to-paycheck, so that median number is already in the ‘well-off’ category by default, making them irrelevant to the main point of discussion.
You have it backwards. The mean, not the median, is skewed by outliers.
If there are ten people in a room with $10 and one person with $1,000,000, the median is $10 whereas the mean is ~$90,000.
No idea why you’re down voted for math :/
Is that true? Median is literally taking the value in the middle. So if there are 30 million 70 year olds then it would be picking the 15th millionth person and using their savings.
You might not know what median means (math pun!).
Averages or Means are skewed by outliers, not the median. The median is just picking the middle number in a list of numbers. There is no skewing possible. If you have 99 people making $1 per year and one person making $1B per year, the median is $1. The average/mean is $1,000,000.99 which is way skewed.
No one is putting their entire retirement into the stock market, so they’re not doubling the amount.
At age 40, it’s recommended that you put 60-80% of retirement funds into the stock market. Doubling that is still significant.
Sweet, I didn’t realize I could double $0.
And you can do it as many times as you like, no charge*!
* = charges may apply, see your local hedge fund for details