Never trust someone else's economic analysis anyway. Here's mine. Maybe use it to help do your own. I work in a professional field and have seen my income rise by a factor of 3.5 in 15 years. That's an annualized 8.4%/yr increase. However the amount of SPY I can buy for 1 hour of work has actually decreased. SPY has risen by a factor of 3.7 (from pre-housing-crash, post-crash would be much higher of course). This is a 9.2%/yr increase in S&P 500 stocks. Some say it's higher return but they're averaging in the crash whereas I just picked a date. The result is this: you can always buy more SPY/DIA/QQQ when you're younger. Your wages will never rise as fast as stonks. A 55 year old doctor can buy the same sized retirement egg for an hour of work as a 16 year old grocery store clerk. The S&P 500 has risen by a factor of 9 since I was in high school. I'm a little over 40 years old. This means that a high school student earning $7/hr has the equivalent stock buying power (for retirement) as a 40 year old earning $63/hr. Stocks are expensive now but they'll never be cheaper. If you think your income sucks (as in it's literally min wage) and you're under 30, you actually have retirement buying superpower. Here's a downer. $100,000 college paid in full with cash is nice. But if that $100,000 were invested at age 20 in the same 9.2% yielding market, it would be $5.25 million at age 65. Buy young. Start now, no matter how little it is and no matter how expensive stocks seem. They'll literally never be cheaper. All this is driven by evil people running a money printer and fucking us, but they're our evil people and it's our money printer until we kill them and destroy it. So until we do, just do the best you can.