Go to college, get a good job, invest in a well diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, in 401k, retire at 65.
This path was rubbish when it was THE path to take.
Today, this path will get you destroyed.
The financial system is collapsing.
This is a good thing and a bad thing.
The bad thing is that you may lose all of your retirement accounts, pensions, 401ks, IRAs, stocks, bonds as various parts of the financial system is shown to be nothing but hot air.
So, what is one supposed to do?
Real Financial Advice
Many of the real financial advisors tell you to pay off your car. Stay out of debt.
It is amazing how much more money you have when you do not have a car payment.
It is also amazing how much more money you have when you pay off your house.
But, with a 30 year mortgage, if you get into a house soon after graduation, you will have it paid off just before retirement.
Many advisers advise you to pay off your mortgage as fast as possible.
Other advisers advise to put that extra money into investments / retirement account (because you basically get to take your mortgage interest payments off your taxes, and the interest rate is so low, you can usually get a better ROI)
Although the math works out to keep the loan, there is a great freeing feeling when you get rid of your house payment.
After financial collapse
Everything we think of as normal is going to come to a crashing halt.
Like, people are going to, en mass, stop paying the Infernal Revolting Syndicate. When people figure out that ALL of their tax dollars are going to where the people DO NOT want them to go, many just stop paying.
The dollar will soon be ignored, and we will have real money. And, one of the best things to do with real money, is just keep it. Real money is usually deflationary. (because production is usually growing when there is real money)
All the paper investments disappear. 💥 POOF 💥
The bonds pay out in funny money no one wants anymore.
The stocks are gone, and it will take years to figure out who owns what, and then the big corporations are all gone anyway.
The banks are gone, because they stopped servicing their customers.
So, basically "investing" becomes, make money.
Save up, and buy things that last is the whole of the plan
How much crypto do you need to retire?
Many people keep asking this question, and videos abound. "Get 1000 XRP to retire" "1 bitcoin will be worth 1 million dollars, (and that is what you need to retire)"
People keep talking about crypto as a way to make dollars, to buy bonds with, to retire.
Didn't we start this crypto thing to get away from the debt-fiat-dollar system?
And so, these people who are talking about retirement goals, are still stuck in the old ways, even while getting "rich" from the new ways.
Why should we ever consider selling our crypto? It is only necessary in this intermediary time. While people are still accepting dollars, and not so much accepting crypto. But, that is changing fast.
Further, what you really need to retire is some property, a house, and a garden/greenhouse. (or you could buy 30 years of freeze dried food)
What you need is lodging and food.
What you don't need is dollars to exchange for lodging and food.
We have been bamboozled into the mindset that we should "pay" for a shittly built house, and continue to pay for it in "property tax", forever. It is like a newborn child being burdened with a portion of the "national debt" which it did nothing to incur, nor did the newborn baby consent.
So, the amount of cyrpto you need, is how much crypto you have to trade/give away/sell/convert to buy a house. After that, you probably only need a fraction of a bitcoin to pay other living expenses for the rest of your life.
If you do not have to work, you can move anywhere in the country/world and live. And this can mean you can get a house for really cheap. There really isn't a housing shortage, there is a shortage of houses in cities where people find jobs. So, if you change your ideas about where you would want to live, you can cut your needed crypto down by a lot.
Thinking about retirement as a function of needing a million dollars, will lead you into all kinds of wrong thinking in this new paradigm that is forming.
Start thinking about what you really need.
Start thinking creatively about acquiring these things.
And still, or better yet, comprehend that over a long enough time scale, all of us crypto holders will be really rich. (if you don't lose everything)
$1 million per bitcoin is not the end of "bitcoin price go up". It is more like the last clear mile-marker just before bitcoin stops being traded for fiat-currency.