To be honest, a $500k to $1m nest egg is a 28 - 35 year old who is making an average average nation wide salary in tech. They would likely not have kids and doesn’t buy the shiny new objects (like a Tesla), but invest in a 401k with a company match.
As long as you keep expenses low, and you don’t have too much debt starting, it’s fairly easy to build that if you’re patient.
For reference, many of my friends in their late 20’s already have a nest egg of similar size. (No kids, low expenses, high end tech jobs)
Take out fed, state, sales and property taxes and that's 60k a year. Even if you save 20% of your after tax income (vastly, vastly higher than the normal savings rate), you're going to have a hair over $130k saved by age 30 assuming you invested all of it and the stock market did it's usual 7% thing. (And this doesn't count first paying off the average college debt of $30k...)
The average software developer salary is not $200k or $300k - that's top 10% salary. Even in SF, the average household income (including all earners) is around 100k.
This isn't sour grapes, by the way - I make in the top 10% myself. But we can't fool ourselves into thinking that's the average.
90k typically doesn’t include benefits (often ranging from $10k - $25k a year, 401k marching, etc.)
Typical income loss to taxes is around 20% as well (effective tax rate). So if you graduate at 23 years and average around $90k that gives you ~8 years of saving (31 years old) and at $30k savings a year (expenses around $2k/month), plus the growth of investments, it’s reasonable to assume that they can save $500k.
Again it really depends. However, I know people who started right around $100k at 22 and are now late 20’s who had that much saved. The trick is to be frugal, which many people are not. Also id argue $90k in Chicago goes a lot further than $150k in the bay (having lived in both). It’s actually easier to save and live frugal elsewhere.
Quite a few developers I know save more than 50% of their after tax income.
If you look at mrmoneymustache.com the vast majority are software engineers and other technologists.
It's probably due to that introspective nature that developers typically have. Our needs are often fairly modest. We're pretty happy to have shelter, food, internet, computer, and eat out a few times a week, etc.
They are making under $100k too, and putting away $30-40k/year. They started working at 21-22 years old and the time they hit 30 years old, they've probably ended up close to $500k assuming their investments compounded.
$100k/year pre-tax is still a tremendous bubble by most of developed world countries and out of reach for the most of the developing world average people (or even engineers) out there.
As long as you keep expenses low, and you don’t have too much debt starting, it’s fairly easy to build that if you’re patient.
For reference, many of my friends in their late 20’s already have a nest egg of similar size. (No kids, low expenses, high end tech jobs)