The finances of my generation

Today I saw an article on Yahoo titled "Basic Rules for Getting Rich." The article, which has very sound advice, can be found here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/basic-rules-for-getting-rich.html


The quote that seems to have poked the hornet nest is:
Say you're 40, have $200,000 saved, with 60% in stocks, and are putting away 10% of a $100,000 salary (including company match). You have a 52% chance of retiring with 70% of your pre-retirement income, according to T. Rowe Price. 



Some of the comments are as follows:


"Say you're 40, have $200,000 saved"...I stopped reading there.


I agree......I don't know one 40 year old who has $200,000.


where does this writer get off thinking we all make 100 grand a year ?


 By 40 most people are lucky to have any savings


I barely have 10k put away for retirement at age 40. I think I am the norm, [not] the oddity.


I am not yet 40, but my husband has passed that milestone. Our investments are not in line with the example shown above (especially the 60% bit in stocks--most of our investments are in funds), and we're not quite at the dollar figure mentioned for savings (mostly because our funds are in a "rebuilding" phase), but the numbers there aren't unreasonable. Some of the money we're putting away on a monthly basis goes into Lily's college fund, which I didn't account for in the assessment of our retirement fund. That money is hers for school, not ours for retirement, after all.


We have no car payments, but we do have a mortgage on the house. We have some credit card debt that goes up, gets paid down, and goes up again when we go on vacation--but nothing so exceptional that we are pinching pennies or unable to keep putting money into investments every month. We live in an area with one of the highest costs of living in the United States and we're sending Lily to private school. But we also don't have the most flashy house or buy all the latest this or that. My car is 10 years old, and I'm hoping to get another 5 years out of it at least. We've cut back on eating out. I don't get mani-pedis or get my hair styled. My husband doesn't buy a $5 coffee in the way to work anymore. We don't go out to the movies much (the last movie we saw was Toy Story 3 back in 2010!). 


People have told us that they admire us for our "sacrifices", but I don't see that we're sacrificing quality of life. If you've read the archives of this blog, we just got back from a two week vacation that included a 7-day Caribbean cruise! We're going back to Walt Disney World this winter for a week. We have some of the latest iGadgets that make our life (and my job) easier to handle. 


Are we the exception on so many levels? We have savings...we are *actively* saving with every paycheck. We have a good quality of life. We have good income, but we don't live as if we are rich. We aren't misers, but we are frugal. That puts us so far out of touch with almost everyone we know, however. 


There are days when I am frustrated with the performance of our investments, but I look and see that we *have* investments. I see so many ways for those in my peer group to be able to invest, but I find it difficult to broach the subject with any of them. I don't want to ever have a retirement party for my husband, not because I don't want him to retire (because I certainly can't wait for that day so I can spend more time with him), but because I would feel awkward about inviting our friends to attend, knowing that they will never be able to retire. It isn't a happy thought, but it does make me resolute in pretending to be cutting it close to the bone while we actually are putting our "disposable income" into investments. At least that way we can be in the same boat about not having money to toss out on a whim--even if for entirely different reasons. And on some level, I can hope that maybe they're doing the same thing, too.