Dream On: The American Dream now costs $4.4 million over a lifetime

Throwing on some more extremely rough math:

Assume the average person lives 80 years.

Assume they start working at 20, and retire at 65.

Average out $4.4 mil over 45 years for an average yearly income their entire working life of...

$97,777.77

Ok, now check that against this:

https://www.omnicalculator.com/finance/us-income-percentile

And you get 83rd percentile, alternately stated as you have to be in the top 17% of Americans, by income.

Now again this is quite rough and the most obvious challenge to this math is that these estimated costs seem more to be for households, not individuals.

Well, ok, then if you go by household total income if $97k, this is the 65th percentile of households, ie, top 35% of households.

But to that one can counter that divorce rates are still climbing, and according to BLS, only about half of married households have both partners working.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm

... So basically the American Dream(TM) only exists for something around a quarter-ish of Americans, and of course half of that quarter would basically be considered quite wealthy.