That means every tenth person in line at the DMV (a decent cross-section of society) is worth over a million dollars, and if you're in a major metropolitan area, much more.
You should take those headlines with a grain of salt because they grossly misrepresent the studies they are reporting on. Quoting directly from your article:
"The median 401(k) balance is just $35,345."
Most people who have a 401(k) work at more than one company in their career and rarely roll funds over into the new company's 401(k). It's more common to leave it or roll it into an IRA.
All we know is the median 401(k) account balance at Vanguard is $35k. Vanguard doesn't know about these people's other retirement accounts at Fidelity or Schwab or wherever. If their customers hold IRAs at Vanguard, those aren't accounted for. In the case that a person has multiple 401(k) accounts with Vanguard, it wasn't even clear if the account balances are summed together and counted as one account.
tl;dr These reports are always about average and median retirement account balances, which is not at all the same as average and median retirement savings.
I assume retirees prefer greeter jobs because those probably don't require lifting anything heavy, as a stocker or cashier might need to do.
2. Median doesn’t work that well here. They may not live in a median American town. You are probably uber rich in comparison to the median Earthling
Sorry, but you can't say that you're "not rich," if you're throwing over half a hundred thousand dollars into cryptocurrency. 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/27/60percent-of-americans-are-s...
I'm sure you're a respectable person, and you might not be wealthy by Valley standards, but you're definitely rich. The median American in the 45–54 age bracket has merely seven thousand dollars more saved for retirement than you had thrown into crypto.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/30/vanguard-how-much-americans-...