Damn few. After all, how many of US did?Regardless of winning the lottery the more interesting questions is:
How many 20 somethings will take advantage of their 40-50 year time horizon to become "well-to-do"?
I hope to instill the necessary perspective into my seven year old daughter. Don't know if I will succeed, but I do have a plan to make a serious try at it. It starts with her working for my company as soon as she returns from her two years abroad with her grandmother and aunt. Basically everything she makes will go into a Roth investment account (while making sure that she sees enough of what she earns to grasp the immediate rewards of working and also of giving). The plan is to have her in a solid emotional, educational, and financial shape by the time she is 18 to 21 to take over her investments with a very high chance of succeeding in the long term.
At the risk of getting political (and hence I will try to just leave it at this), perhaps the biggest hurdles we will face is the ever-increasing degree to which people are punished for being responsible. She will be ineligible for most financial aid -- even so-called "merit" scholarships -- because she won't have a "need". She will have to make the decision to be responsible and pay for her education through a combination of savings and working while in school as opposed to taking out huge student loans knowing that she can repay them at a rate that doesn't even cover the interest charges and then force others to pay them back after ten or fifteen years when they are "forgiven". She'll have to watch others that took out loans that they shouldn't have been able to qualify for to buy houses that they couldn't afford get special government rescues while she is stuck with the realities of seeing property that she saved and paid cash for drop in value during some future recession. But, hopefully, we can instill in her the right attitude regarding all of these things and more ("right" as defined by me and my wife, not what is increasingly deemed correct by society).