On Thu, 1 Feb 2018 07:41:31 -0500, Keyser Soze wrote:

On 2/1/18 1:17 AM, wrote:

Define "wealthiest". Are you just talking about what you call the
middle class? (households making $110k+) That is going to be a pretty
big number since they will have the biggest 401ks, assuming they did
not raid them.
I am sure if you just want to talk about hedge funds and guys like
Buffett they have huge holdings but they also have stockholders
themselves. They are essentially those funds I was talking about. You
can't confuse that with individual investors.
I suppose We could actually track down what percentage of stocks are
held by the real middle class, that guy who makes $50k or so but you
really need to figure out how much is in his pension or 401k.
I tend not to believe some of the things that the left (or the right)
says until I see how they arrived at their statistic. I crunched
numbers at work long enough to figure out you can make a database say
pretty much anything you want, just by what "view" you define in your
query.



Your assumption, I suppose, is that the guy making $50k these days has
some sort of defined benefit pension. Well, that's not 2018 America so
much. Defined benefit pension are disappearing. And at a $50k income
level, I wonder how many workers are contributing to an
employer-sponsored 401k, or hang around long enough to get vested, or
have enough left over after living expenses for putting away some bucks
in an IRA.

I agree defined benefit pension plans started disappearing rapidly
during the Clinton phoney "prosperity" days and most were gone by the
time his tech bubble popped. Most employers are offering matching 401k
program s now and the idea of "vesting" is pretty much an obsolete
term. Your 401k is all yours from day one. The employer contribution
may have a time on the job requirement at some places tho.
BTW if you plan on living after you stop working, your savings ARE
living expenses. That new big screen TV you buy when you are 25 would
be 8 to 10 times as much when you retire if you invested it. The same
is true of that new car.
Many years ago I heard you have to pay yourself first. I put my first
raise at IBM into the stock plan and continued doing that until I
maxed out at 10% of my gross. It really just meant I deferred getting
a raise for a while but I was racking up savings. When I finally got
over the "new car" thing and paid off my car, I saved that money too.
Pretty soon I was buying cars with cash. By your standards I was never
rich but I still managed to save money. I would rather be financially
secure than have a lot of flashy things. I think that is rare in the
US.